The American Prospect #304

The Last Days of Habeas Corpus

BY LINCOLN CAPLAN

What Los Angeles Can Teach the Country

BY HAROLD MEYERSON

Los Infiltradores:

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contents

VOLUME 24, NUMBER 4 JUL /AUG 2013

PAGE 16

PAGE 79

PAGE 87

NOTEBOOK 7 LOG CABINS AND LOST SOULS BY GABRIEL ARANA 12 THE EX-CON FACTOR BY JAMELLE BOUIE 16 THE NEW SOCIALISTS BY STEVE BRODNER 18 OUR PASSIVITY SURPLUS BY RICH YESELSON

FEATURES 20 THE LIFE AND DEATH OF CRYSTAL WILSON BY MONICA POTTS 28 L.A. STORY BY HAROLD MEYERSON 42 THE WITHERED WRIT BY LINCOLN CAPLAN 48 LOS INFILTRADORES BY MICHAEL MAY 60 SWEAT AND TEARS BY ROBERT KUTTNER

CULTURE 67 TAKE ME OUT WITH THE CROWD BY ABBY RAPOPORT 72 ALONE IN THE U.S.A. BY MARK SCHMITT 76 THE NORTH WING BY STEVE ERICKSON 79 NEW TREASURE IN MAINE BY DEBORAH WEISGALL 84 IF POT BECOMES LEGAL BY JAMELLE BOUIE 87 AGEE, BEFORE HE WAS FAMOUS BY JOHN LINGAN

COLUMNS 5 PROSPECTS MUST AUSTERITY KEEP WINNING? BY ROBERT KUTTNER 92 COMMENT EARLY AND OFTEN BY ABBY RAPOPORT Cover art source photo by Tony Tremblay / iStockphoto.

Art above by Steve Brodner, Trent Bell Photography, AP Images, and John Cuneo

1

PAGE 67

contributors

JOHN LINGAN lives outside Washington, D.C., and has written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Morning News, and other venues. He reviews James Agee’s Cotton Tenants.

“Agee will always be relevant,” he says. “The South he captures no longer exists, but his language is so fluid and creative that he still makes us see poverty in new ways.”

LINCOLN CAPLAN, who covered the Supreme Court for The New York Times editorial page, writes about the writ of habeas corpus and how it was gutted by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. “This statute is the most draconian and difficult to grasp of any regularly interpreted by the justices,” he says.

“I’ve taken a stab at explaining why it’s important and appalling.”

DEBORAH WEISGALL has covered the arts for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Esquire.

She writes about the Colby College Museum of Art. “The first time I visited, I was surprised to find such quality in a college museum in the middle of Maine,” she says. “A couple of years later, a family gave it a superb collection.

Colby is like the little museum that could—it’s a great museum.”

MICHAEL MAY is a former managing editor of the Texas Observer, teaches radio documentary at the Salt Institute, and contributes to shows like This American Life, which featured a radio version of his piece on young immigrant activists. “When I first heard there was a gang of undocumented youth infiltrating detention centers, I was hooked,” he says. “I can’t resist a good caper.”

GABRIEL ARANA is a Prospect senior editor, whose writing has appeared in The Nation, Salon, and The Advocate. His piece profiles gay retirement communities.

“Ageism is a big problem in the gay community, particularly among gay men,” he says.“Gay pride marches don't feature many LGBT elders.

I wondered: Where do they go?”

MARK SCHMITT is a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and a former executive editor of the Prospect. He writes about George Packer’s The Unwinding. “The book is steeped in nostalgia,” he says. “Recalling the 1950s’ more secure pensions, narrower income gap, and a political system that seemed to work better provides a reassurance that things could be different today.”

MONICA POTTS is a Prospect senior writer. She investigates the decline of life expectancy among white women without high-school diplomas. “It’s a finding no one expected, and I wanted to report it from northern Arkansas, where I’m from,” she says. “The piece is about the women left behind by progress. Perhaps I escaped a similar fate, so it is a story that really hit home.”

STEVE MOORS is a British artist who lives in New York.

His work appears frequently in the Prospect as well as in other publications, including Rolling Stone, Time, and Flaunt.

“My most memorable experience in the art world was when, after approaching Francis Bacon in the London Underground for a photograph, he declined, stroked my cheek, called me darling, and promptly ran like hell.”

PUBLISHER JAY HARRIS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF KIT RACHLIS FOUNDING CO-EDITORS ROBERT KUTTNER, PAUL STARR EXECUTIVE EDITOR BOB MOSER ART DIRECTOR MARY PARSONS CULTURE EDITOR SARAH KERR EDITOR-AT-LARGE HAROLD MEYERSON SENIOR EDITORS CHRISTEN ARAGONI, GABRIEL ARANA WEB EDITOR CLARE MALONE SENIOR WRITER MONICA POTTS ASSOCIATE EDITOR JAIME FULLER STAFF REPORTERS JAMELLE BOUIE, ABBY RAPOPORT RESEARCH EDITOR SUSAN O’BRIAN WRITING FELLOWS PATRICK CALDWELL, AMELIA THOMSON-DEVEAUX EDITORIAL INTERNS COLIN DAILEDA, ERIC GARCIA, MARISSA LEE, TONYA RILEY, BRYCE STUCKI OFFICE MANAGER KATHLEEN MARGILLO CONTRIBUTING EDITORS SPENCER ACKERMAN, MARCIA ANGELL, ALAN BRINKLEY, TOM CARSON, JONATHAN COHN, ANN CRITTENDEN, GARRETT EPPS, JEFF FAUX, MICHELLE GOLDBERG, GERSHOM GORENBERG, E.J. GRAFF, BOB HERBERT, ARLIE HOCHSCHILD, CHRISTOPHER JENCKS, RANDALL KENNEDY, JOSH KUN, SARAH POSNER, JOHN POWERS, JEDEDIAH PURDY, ROBERT D. PUTNAM, RICHARD ROTHSTEIN, DEBORAH A. STONE, NOY THRUPKAEW, MICHAEL TOMASKY, PAUL WALDMAN, WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, MATTHEW YGLESIAS CO-FOUNDER ROBERT B. REICH VICE PRESIDENT, STRATEGY & DEVELOPMENT AMY CONROY DEVELOPMENT ASSOCIATE SUSAN JED ADVERTISING MANAGER ED CONNORS, (202) 776-0730 X119, ECONNORS@PROSPECT.ORG BOARD OF DIRECTORS JANET SHENK (CHAIR), JACOB S. HACKER, JAY HARRIS, STEPHEN HEINTZ, ROBERT KUTTNER, ARNIE MILLER, KIT RACHLIS, MILES RAPOPORT, ADELE SIMMONS, PAUL STARR, BEN TAYLOR, AMELIA WARREN TYAGI AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT O’BRIEN MEDIA GROUP NEWSSTAND DISTRIBUTION KABLE (212) 705-4642 SUBSCRIPTION CUSTOMER SERVICE 1-888-MUST-READ (687-8732) SUBSCRIPTION RATES $29.95 (U.S.), $39.95 (CANADA), AND $44.95 (FOREIGN) REPRINTS PERMISSIONS@PROSPECT.ORG

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“There are lots of lessons we will, in time, draw from the Boston Marathon tragedy, but one is already clear: Don’t denigrate government workers. Along with some heroic civilians, it was government workers who ran toward the blast zone. And they were unionized government workers.” – Paul Begala, Newsweek, 4/22/13

Lee Saunders, President

Laura Reyes, Secretary-Treasurer

Steve Stapleton, Boston Public Works Department employee and AFSCME Local 445 member. (Photo via Council 93) 472-13

472-13

Prospects

Must Austerity Keep Winning?

BY ROBERT KUTTNER

T

he EU’s extreme version of budget cutting has pushed the European economy ever deeper into its worst recession since World War II. The United States, pursuing a bipartisan target of $4 trillion in budget cuts over a decade, is mired in an economy of slow growth and inadequate job creation. Our government’s failure to give debt relief to indentured college students and underwater homeowners functions as a multitrillion-dollar twin drag on a feeble recovery. The smart money knows just how weak this economy is. Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke had only to suggest that he might nudge interest rates up a bit, and markets panicked.

So austerity is the wrong medicine for the prolonged aftermath of a financial collapse. Case closed.

But hold on. Winning the intellectual debate doesn’t matter, because we keep losing the politics.

Until we start changing the policies, or at least begin causing more political embarrassment for the budget hawks, austerity will reign, no matter how perverse its impact.

Why are we losing the politics?

For one thing, the Wall Street view of austerity reaches deep into the Democratic Party. President Barack Obama and his advisers are still convinced that we need those trillions in budget cuts. That makes his rhetoric about infrastructure spending and other serious uses of public resources hollow if not cynical. And Obama is the left wing of what passes for mainstream debate. Obama’s speeches since his re-election

are a mishmash of bold calls for public investment (universal pre-­ kindergarten, an infrastructure bank) and genuflection to the conventional fiscal wisdom. (“The package I am offering includes some difficult cuts that I do not particularly like.”)

Republicans, meanwhile, use any vehicle that comes along—the sequester, debt-ceiling votes, even the doubling of interest rates on Stafford college loans—to extract even harsher cuts. If the cuts damage the economy (and they must), so much the better for the GOP. They can blame the continuing slump on Obama and the Democrats and win the Senate in 2014 and the presidency, they hope, in 2016. With the president of the United States, a Democrat, having reinforced public myths about deficit cutting, it’s difficult to pin the political blame on Republicans for sabotaging the recovery.

So what’s a progressive to do?

One strategy is to bring tangible debt relief to students and homeowners, dramatically demonstrating that the problem is not public debt but private debt on the backs of those who can least afford it.

Oregon has pioneered a pilot program that would allow a student to attend a public university debtfree. Sponsors propose a contractual obligation to repay the state 3 percent of net income for 24 years.

At an annual income of $40,000, that’s only $1,200 a year, or $100 a month, far less than most college loans. The Oregonian who strikes it rich would pay a good deal more.

The Oregon model is important far beyond its impact on the next

generation of students because it reclaims faith in two abiding progressive principles: that public institutions should be publicly funded and affordable and that one’s obligations should be based

into whole loans, passing the savings along to homeowners who stand to get deep relief on the principal owed. The work of community groups and unions, the strategy relies on private investors

To defeat government bashing, we need public support for the middleclass emblems of higher education and housing. on the capacity to pay. A graduated repayment schedule (like the progressive income tax) would be even better. Politically, the Oregon plan is a powerful rebuttal to Peter G. Peterson and the corporate “Fix the Debt” campaign, with its professed concern for “our children and grandchildren” justifying reduced social outlay. But government outlay to lift the blight of student debt tangibly helps our children right now.

For homeowners, the federal government has failed to produce adequate refinancing and principal reduction. Obama’s programs have helped just one underwater homeowner in ten. But some local governments have begun experimenting with the use of eminent domain to take control of toxic mortgages that have been sliced and diced into bonds. Government then converts them back

willing to provide the front money.

It would be even better if government provided the initial capital.

As politics, what could be more emblematic than housing and higher education to defeat the forces of austerity and government bashing? Both epitomize the efficient use of public debt to propel millions into the middle class.

Both vividly demonstrate the affirmative potential of government, up close and personal.

If logic and evidence were the keys to changing the views of policy elites, the insights of thinkers like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz would have reversed conventional fiscal wisdom long ago.

But both national parties remain substantially captured by the pain lobby. The only way to dethrone austerity is to take back the narrative, the politics, and the policies from the ground up. 

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 5

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Log Cabins and Lost Souls Retirement can be sweet for well-off LGBT elders, but it’s fraught with perils for most.

BY G A BR I E L A R A N A

st ev e mo or s

W

hen Marcia Hickman and Sue Spirit first started talking retirement 20 years ago, they mostly worried about the location and the weather.

In Ohio, where they met and ran a women’s retreat together, Marcia missed the mountains of her upstate New York youth. Sue wanted a place “with seasons.” The pair, who will celebrate 30 years together in August, describe themselves as “mostly out”—Marcia hasn’t told her three children she and Sue are a couple, but she figures

they’ve put it together by now. She and Sue hadn’t thought about settling down with other gay people until they learned about Carefree Cove. “Around 2000 we heard about ‘lesbian land’ being started in North Carolina,” Sue says. A planned residential community for older gay men, lesbians, and transgendered people, “the Cove” was then an empty 165-acre plot 20 miles outside of Boone, a small university town in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The backers had an opening bargain: For $2,000, you

could come down and pick your lot. “We put down the money, and six months later we were building,” Sue says.

In the 1960s and 1970s, members of the Stonewall generation carved out communities like the Castro in San Francisco, the West Village in New York, and Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., safe havens where a man could walk down the street in heels without causing a ruckus or a lesbian couple could hold hands while shopping. The gay retirement

villas sprouting up at the turn of the millennium were far more commercial—and planned—than those early “gayborhoods,” but at a basic level what they offered was similar: insulation from prejudice, places where queer people were free to be queer. But as the wrought-iron gate at its entrance suggests, the Cove is far more exclusive than an urban neighborhood.

Set against a densely wooded incline with winding dirt roads, the Cove could have been plucked from a travel brochure for the Bavarian Alps. From a cleared plot at the apex of the development— the site of a planned clubhouse— stone chimneys poke through a canopy of trees. Along the horizon, the mountain ranges crowd against each other, gradient shades

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 7

of purple fighting for the skyline. It’s summer, before the humidity has set in, and the air is crisp and clean.

Cathy Groene, one of the Cove’s developers, gives me a tour of the grounds. As she descends along the main dirt road, she stops periodically to point out one of the project’s 25 homes—all log, stone, or cedar-sided cabins, as required by the charter. She offers a detail about each occupant as we go; everybody knows everybody here. Along the path, beech and maple trees soar into the sky. Sunlight filters through the leaves. Daniel Boone, who opened up the Appalachians, is purported to have said he had “never been lost but was bewildered once for about three days.” This is the sort of place where you wouldn’t mind being bewildered for a while.

The Cove sprouted up along with a handful of bucolic retreats for LGBT elders in the early 2000s. With the baby-boomer generation on the cusp of retirement and the economy chugging

along at full speed, gay and lesbian entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to create retreats for people like themselves and cash in on the emerging market of 1.5 million gay elderly (and growing). When it opened in 1997, the beachside Palms of Manasota outside Tampa, Florida, billed itself as the first all-LGBT retirement community; unlike the couple of developments that opened up for women in the mid-1990s, the Palms was co-ed.

The Cove’s opening in 2001 was followed by the environmentally conscious Birds of a Feather in Pecos, New Mexico, in 2004; the upscale, adobedotted Rainbow Vision in nearby Santa Fe in 2006; and Rainbow Vista in Gresham, Oregon, in 2007. As with other luxury retirement developments, the recession dealt a blow to this burgeoning market; the Palms and Rainbow Vision declared bankruptcy while other projects were put on hold. But this summer, with the economy picking up again, the ritzy Fountaingrove

Lifestyles of the Gay and Aging THE PERCENTAGE OF GAY SENIORS WHO ...

have no children: 90%

20% GAY GENERAL SENIORS POPULATION

live alone: 34%

23%

GAY GENERAL SENIORS POPULATION

live in large cities: 43% 27% GAY GENERAL SENIORS POPULATION

The entrance to Carefree Cove, an LGBT retirement community in North Carolina LGBT luxury retirement development Fountaingrove Lodge in Santa Rosa, California

8 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JUL /AUG 2013

Lodge—it has an orchard, wine cellar, golf course, and entrance fees as high as $900,000—is set to open in Santa Rosa, California.

Earlier models of all-gay communities were considerably more austere and typically women-only. Since the 1970s, radical “land dykes” (as in “back to the land”) have operated separatist colonies in rural outposts.

While planned, these backwoods communes—some without electricity or running water—share little in common with the comfortable lifestyle at the Cove. The closest analogue, and immediate predecessor, to LGBT senior retreats are the handful of women’s RV communities that sprung up in the mid-1990s in Arizona, Florida, and Oregon. One of them—the Pueblo in Apache Junction, Arizona— caters to retirees.

The Pueblo was one of the places Groene and her partner of 24 years, Gina Razete, scouted when they started looking for a place to retire. While the couple are avid RVers, they did not want to spend the rest of their lives beating back the desert sun. Groene and Razete, who has a background in real-estate development, decided to create from the ground up the sort of women’s community they’d want to live in. In 1994, they opened the Resort on Carefree Boulevard in Fort Myers, Florida—278 RVs and manufactured homes on 50 acres dotted with ponds. The lots went quickly, and by 1996 more than 300 older lesbians called the Resort home.

Spurred by the Resort’s success, Groene and Razete sought to create a similar haven in the mountains of North Carolina. Like its predecessor, the Cove was originally restricted to women. But to broaden the target market, the developers opened up the project to men. Razete and Groene estimate the ratio of women to men at the Cove at 60–40. While a handful of gay men want nothing to do with the other residents—“the boys at the top of the hill,” they’re called—down the hollow there is a strong sense of community. One of the residents hosts a potluck each month. Members tend a communal garden right inside the Cove’s entrance. In town, the High Country Lesbians hold game nights and movie

p h o t o s : c at h y g r o e n e / c a r e f r e e c o v e ; f o u ta i n g r o v e lo d g e ; d ata s o u r c e s : 1 . n at i o n a l a s s o c i at i o n o f s o c i a l w o r k e r s , 2 0 0 9 ; 2 . g a r y j . g at e s , w i l l i a m s i n s t i t u t e , 2 0 1 3 ; 3 . m e t l i f e m at u r e m a r k e t i n s t i t u t e , 2 0 1 0

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outings, while Appalachian State University runs a continuing-education program for the elderly.

But more than picturesque scenery and an active social life, the Cove guarantees security. Lissa Brown, a writer and former teacher who just turned 70, puts it wryly: “It’s nice when you live in an area like this to know that if you want to go down the road holding hands, you can do it. Nobody is going to shoot you.” For Brown’s generation of gay people, that sense of security is still a precious— and fragile—thing. Thirty years from now, given the dramatic rise in public support for gay rights, queer retirees will be able to take for granted that they will be accepted and understood in any retirement setting. For Stonewallers, however, peace of mind is an essential appeal of living in a community like Carefree Cove. But it comes with a hefty price tag—one that few LGBT seniors can afford.

fa i t h c at h c a r t / t h e o r e g o n i a n / l a n d o v

DESPITE THE STEREOTYPE of the

affluent gay, more LGBT seniors live in poverty than their straight counterparts. Half reach retirement with only $10,000 in the bank. They are far less likely than younger gays to be partnered or married. They’re more likely to be childless and estranged from their birth families, leaving them to weather the challenges of retirement alone. Even those with long-term partners are at a disadvantage, despite recent legal breakthroughs. In June, the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, putting some gay couples on equal legal footing with straight couples for the first time, but that’s little help to older gay couples who have missed out on decades’ worth of tax and insurance breaks.

All those factors leave queer seniors with fewer retirement options than their straight counterparts. Without the social support or financial means to ensure independence, they often become separated from their gay communities and “families of choice.”

Whether they rely on home-care workers or move into assisted-living facilities paid for by Medicaid, they often encounter staff and residents who are not comfortable with gay people. Fearful of mistreatment, many

feel compelled to go back into the closet­—particularly painful for members of the generation that invented the politics of coming out. For those who aren’t lucky enough to settle down in a place like Carefree Cove, the golden years can still look a lot like the pre-Stonewall years.

A self-described “dyke” in her sixties, Imani Woody has worked with LGBT seniors and their caregivers for the past 20 years. As Washington, D.C.’s local outreach director for SAGE (Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders), the country’s largest advocacy organization for older gay folk, Woody conducts sensitivity training for nursing-home staff and connects low-income elderly with public housing and HIV/AIDS services. She’s met countless LGBT seniors who’ve ended up “re-closeting” themselves.

Sarah (not her real name) came out in the 1980s at the height of the AIDS crisis. A member of the Nubian Women, a social group for African American women over 35, she was, in Woody’s words, “a big dyke girl back in the day.” In suits, creased pants, and tailored shirts, girlfriend du jour in tow, she was a fixture at LGBT social

Seniors play a game of cards at Rainbow Vista, an LGBT retirement community in Gresham, Oregon.

Despite the stereotype of the

AFFLUENT GAY,

more LGBT seniors live in poverty than their straight counterparts.

events and rallies. “She was political,” Woody says. “She was in the mix.” All that changed when Sarah, who had been married with children before coming out, hit old age. Doctor visits replaced social invitations. As health problems kicked in, Sarah drifted from the gay community and came to rely on her children for support. She still preferred jeans to dresses, but by the time she met Woody, she no longer identified as a lesbian. “She told me, ‘A ll that gay stuff, I don’t do that anymore,’” Woody says. Afraid of raising eyebrows at her grandchildren’s school, Sarah makes sure to “dress fem” before picking them up. “Her world was big,” Woody says, “and now it has shrunk.”

Few eldercare institutions have LGBT-inclusive policies, and care­givers often don’t know how to look after queer folk. “Although a lot of folks in this area are competent at taking care of adults, LGBT people are nowhere on their radar screen,” says Lisa Krinsky, director of the LGBT Aging Project, which advocates for the rights of queer seniors. According to a 2011 report from the National Academy on an Aging Society, less than one-third of eldercare agencies offer gay-­sensitivity

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 9

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training. Most nursing homes do not ask on their intake forms if a person has a same-sex partner. Without gestures to signal that it’s safe to be gay, many elderly—who have lived much, if not most, of their lives in the closet— assume that it is not. “I worked in five nursing homes over 27 years, and I only encountered one man—only one—who was openly gay,” says Mary Blanchett, a licensed nursing-home administrator who formerly ran a group that helps gay seniors plan for retirement. “That tells you something.”

Worse, active discrimination drives some back into the closet. “The disaster scenario is encountering a staff that is homophobic, that is transphobic,” says Robert Espinoza, senior director for public policy and communications at SAGE . “You go from a life that is independent and with friends and open and proud and enter a space where you have to re-enter the closet.”

Accurate data about older gay people’s lives are hard to come by, partly because while federal law requires eldercare institutions to report statistics on other groups of minority residents, that’s not the case with queer folk. But a 2011 study conducted by six LGBT advocacy groups provides a snapshot of what life looks like in old age. In long-term care facilities, 43 percent of residents, relatives, and staff members reported that they had witnessed or experienced harassment based on perceived sexual orientation. Advocates for the elderly say that accords with the anecdotal reports they hear. Elderly residents sometimes speak in disapproving whispers about the one gay person on the floor; they may use anti-gay slurs or single gays out for social exclusion. Staff members at nursing homes may refuse to care for queer residents or use gloves when they typically would not. Pictures of same-sex partners are taken down.

Conservative Christian residents and staffers, concerned for gay people’s mortal souls, openly pray for them to leave the “homosexual lifestyle” or actively try to convert them.

Even in their own homes, LGBT seniors often fear mistreatment at the hands of home health-care workers if they’re open about themselves. Ken South of Prime Timers D.C., a social

It’s Not Easy Being Gray (and LGBT)

13% HAVE BEEN DENIED HEALTH CARE OR RECEIVED INFERIOR CARE BECAUSE OF THEIR SEXUAL ORIENTATION

20% DO NOT DISCLOSE THEIR SEXUAL ORIENTATION TO A PHYSICIAN FOR FEAR OF DISCRIMINATION

20% ARE LESS LIKELY TO SEEK NEEDED SOCIAL SERVICES FOR FEAR OF DISCRIMINATION

8.3% HAVE BEEN NEGLECTED BY CAREGIVERS BECAUSE OF THEIR SEXUAL ORIENTATION

8.9% HAVE FACED FINANCIAL EXPLOITATION OR BLACKMAIL

47% HAVE LESS THAN $10,000 IN THEIR RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS

club for older gay and bisexual men, says group members joke about the need to “de-gay” the house—queer periodicals like The Advocate go at the bottom of the stack, pictures of a same-sex partner are moved to an isolated room. They even worry about being found out after they die, South says. “I’ve heard friends say, half ­kidding, ‘I have to put this in my will: The executor of my estate has to clean out my computer, get rid of all the magazines and pictures.’”

ON A WEDNESDAY EVENING in June,

members of Prime Timers trickle into the upstairs bar of Dupont Italian Kitchen on Washington’s 17th Street.

The strip is home to some of the city’s oldest gay bars, but Ken South says it wasn’t easy to find one that would host a weekly meeting of older gay guys. “I could stand naked in the corner at one of those places and be totally ignored,” says South, who is 67 and works at an HIV–advocacy organization. The staff here is friendly, though; the lone server upstairs, who looks to be in his twenties, weaves through the crowd of about two dozen, distributing drinks.

“Here you go, honey,” he says, placing his hand on one of the group’s older members, a man in his eighties. The conversation keeps drifting back to aging. “Someone called me ‘sir’ on the Metro coming in,” says one man in his fifties. “The only place I want to be called ‘sir’ is in the bedroom,” South replies. Ageism is prevalent among gay men—the joke is that you’re dead at 30—and it fuels the loneliness that often accompanies old age.

Prime Timers, like other social groups for older gays, is designed to be an antidote to that loneliness. It’s also part of a larger “aging in place” movement, an effort to help the elderly stay in their communities, live at home as long as possible, and maintain contact with people of different ages. While a few Prime Timers have moved into assisted-living facilities in the District, most continue to live in the homes and neighborhoods they’ve inhabited for years. Some are not out in broader society, but the group’s weekly meetings provide a point of contact with the gay community, a place to make friends, find lovers, and commiserate.

The trend toward aging in place is reflected in an increasing demand for retirement options in the urban centers that are the heart of gay culture. “Some retirement communities are being created out in suburbs, but it’s not a big draw for LGBT seniors I work with,” says Seth Kilbourn, executive director of Openhouse, a San Francisco– based advocacy organization for LGBT seniors. “They don’t necessarily want that golf-course kind of experience.

They want to continue to go to the opera.” Fortunately, the largest new retirement centers in cities cater to those who can’t afford a Carefree Cove or a Fountaingrove Lodge—or don’t have their own homes to stay in, like many of the Prime Timers. Openhouse is renovating a residential hall and breaking ground on an adjacent complex in downtown San Francisco for low-income LGBT seniors. It follows Triangle Square in Los Angeles, which opened in 2007 and similarly serves low-income people. Philadelphia’s William Way Senior Residences are set to open later this year. While all of these developments are for low-income people, Kilbourn says Openhouse hopes to break ground on middle-­class complexes in the future.

Even with these new developments, however, few gay retirees will have the option of living in an all-gay environment. So advocates like Imani Woody are working to make traditional housing options friendlier by educating staff and residents at retirement centers.

It’s basic stuff. “It’s as simple as learning what a transgendered person is,” Woody says. “You want to look for signs that there might be a gay couple—a patient may call them their ‘significant other’ or use the group pronoun ‘they.’”

In another generation or two, society will have provided all the sensitivity training the retirement industry needs. Tomorrow’s home- and healthcare workers will have grown up in a culture that doesn’t tolerate prejudice against LGBT people, and so will have straight retirees. For members of the Stonewall generation, it’s a bittersweet irony: While old age is fraught with difficulties, they have laid the groundwork for retirement to ultimately be just as gay-friendly as the streets of Chelsea. 

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 11

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The Ex-Con Factor Felony-disenfranchisement laws suppress black turnout enough to swing elections, and the future of reform is murky.

M

ercedies Harris was 27 in 1990, when he was arrested for drug possession and distribution in Fairfax, Virginia. Harris had served in the Marines, but the death of his brother in 1986—killed by a hit-and-run driver—sent him down a familiar path. “I was angry and I couldn’t find the guy who did it,” Harris says. “I got into drugs to find a way to medicate myself.”

Upon his release in 2003, Harris, who had earned his GED in prison, found a job and began to rebuild his life. He faced the usual practical challenges: “I couldn’t get on a lease, I had no insurance, I had no medical coverage, my driver’s license was expired.” But he found one obstacle that was especially difficult to overcome: He couldn’t vote. Virginia is one of four states—along with Florida, Iowa, and Kentucky—that strip voting rights from felons for life. The U.S. is the world’s only democracy that permits permanent disenfranchisement. While most states have some restrictions on felons voting, it takes a decree from the governor or a clemency board to restore voting rights in the four states with lifetime bans. In Virginia alone, 450,000 residents are disenfranchised. In Florida, the total is an astonishing 1.5 million.

For Harris, voting was an essential part of his effort to become a full-fledged citizen again. “It was important to me to have a place in this democracy,” he says, “and to have a say, too.” He was persistent: He began petitioning the state to restore his rights in 2008, under then-Governor Tim Kaine, and continued for the next four years. Last year, he finally got his vote back. He remembers the exact date: October 15, 2012. Harris has made voting-rights restoration for others his mission as well. For the past two years, he has led the Hollaback and Restore Project, a ministry in the sleepy Blue

12 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JUL /AUG 2013

Ridge Mountain town of Waynesboro that counsels ex-felons, helps them find jobs, and guides them through the application process to regain the franchise. Voting is at the heart of Hollaback and Restore’s mission of rehabilitating ex-felons through full participation in community life. The ministry’s message, Harris says, is that “you can be anything you want to, and being a felon doesn’t hold you back.”

When the state says you can’t vote, he says, it’s sending the opposite message.

All but two states, Vermont and Maine, disenfranchise felons for some period of time. Thirteen states strip voting rights only for the period of incarceration. Most have waiting periods with various requirements, like paying fines and completing special applications. Seven states—Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Mississippi, Nevada, Tennessee, and Wyoming— have lifetime bans for particular crimes or repeat felony offenders.

They aren’t the strictest laws, but they affect enough potential voters to sway statewide elections. In Alabama, more than 260,000 residents are stripped of their voting rights; more than half, just over 137,000, are African American. In Mississippi, blacks account for nearly 60 percent of the 182,000 disenfranchised citizens.

When you add it all up, the numbers are startling. More than five million Americans are currently disenfranchised because of felony convictions—an increase of some 270,000 over the past decade. Nearly 1.4 million are, like Harris, black men.

They represent 24 percent of the total disenfranchised population and a whopping 13 percent of all voting-age African American men.

Black men’s overrepresentation is no accident. Felony disenfran­chise­ment laws trace back to the post-­­Reconstruction era when former Confederates and white Southern

Mercedies Harris spent four years regaining his right to vote in Virginia. Now he helps other ex-felons through the Hollaback and Restore Project.

Democrats rolled back the political gains made by free slaves after the war. The whole point of these laws was the mass exclusion of black men from mainstream civic life. It still is.

You can see the effects most clearly in black turnout rates. The nation’s 27 million African American voters are concentrated in the South and in Northern urban centers. Almost two-thirds—66 percent—voted in last year’s presidential election, giving African Americans higher turnout than any other racial group. But unlike with other groups, there was an odd gender gap: While more than 70 percent of black women voted, only 60 percent of black men went to the polls.

The difference, according to Bernard Fraga of Harvard University, is explained entirely by the huge number of black men who are disenfranchised.

The dampening effect on African American turnout is enough to swing elections—even a presidential contest.

In fact, it already has. After the Bush v. Gore debacle in Florida in 2000, a University of Minnesota sociologist compiled the numbers and found 600,000 disenfranchised felons in Florida. Given the composition of the

photo courtesy mercedies harris

BY J A M E L L E B O U I E

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state’s prison population—at the time, 48 percent black—it’s fair to say that a large number, if not the majority, of those felons were African American.

If even a fraction of them had been allowed to vote in 2000, Gore would have carried Florida and won the White House.

Disenfranchised felons are concentrated largely in the South. Which means that if you’re a voting-age American who’s forbidden to vote, odds are good that you’re living in the former Confederacy. You’re probably black, probably a man, and likely went to prison for a nonviolent offense like drug possession or theft. Racism didn’t put you in jail, necessarily, but the legacy of discrimination put you in the class of people who are more likely to be arrested, more likely to be convicted, more likely to be sentenced— and more likely to have basic rights of citizenship taken away.

AS A CONCEPT, THE DENIAL of vot-

ing rights for ex-criminals stretches far back before the Civil War or the American Revolution; it has roots in Greek and Roman law, medieval law, and English common law. Many ancient societies imposed “civil death”

on those convicted of serious crimes, stripping them of all citizenship rights. But felon disenfranchisement as we know it began in the years following Reconstruction, during the “Redemption” period in which former Confederates violently deposed Republican governments throughout the South. With a constituency of freed slaves and sympathetic whites, the “party of Lincoln” had built a foothold in the region. The fiercely contested 15th Amendment to the Constitution had extended suffrage to freed African American men and their descendants, and the 1870s saw a flowering of black political activity.

Freed slaves ran legislatures, served in both chambers of Congress, established public schooling, and built political organizations. Whites were eager to dismantle this embryonic political order.

They got their chance. To resolve the bitterly disputed 1876 presidential election, members of Congress struck an informal deal, dubbed the Compromise of 1877, which pulled federal troops out of the South. Without the Union Army enforcing the law, blacks’ voting rights immediately came under assault—sometimes by

5.85

MILLION Americans, or 1 in 40 adults, have currently or permanently lost the right to vote

2.2

MILLION African Americans are currently disenfranchised

1.4

MILLION

d ata s o u r c e : t h e s e n t e n c i n g p r o j e c t / p r o c o n . o r g ; p h o t o : s t e v e f r a m e / t h e n e w yo r k t i m e s / r e d u x

black males are currently disenfranchised 2010 numbers

Anna R. Reynolds, a former convict, casts a ballot in Dothan, Alabama, February 2008.

restrictive laws, other times by violent means. Alabama and Mississippi were among the first to pass poll taxes, literacy tests, and other measures designed to prevent freed slaves from voting. “Grandfather” laws, which allowed men to vote only if they were eligible in 1867—before blacks had the vote in the South—were especially devastating. After Louisiana passed its grandfather clause in 1896, the percentage of registered black voters plummeted from 45 percent to 4 percent in four years.

From the start, criminal disenfranchisement laws were part of the white Democrats’ Redemption campaign.

They were written as race-­neutral but were racist in their effects, as Middle Tennessee State University history professor Pippa Holloway documents in her book Living in Infamy: Felon Disenfranchisement and the History of American Citizenship. In just the period between 1874 and 1882, every Southern state but Texas found ways to disenfranchise those convicted of minor crimes like petty theft. “Some Southern states changed their laws to upgrade misdemeanor property crimes to felonies,” Holloway explains, “and finally, Southern courts interpreted existing laws to include misdemeanors as disenfranchising crimes.”

In 1896, for example, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled that the disenfranchisement provision in the state constitution applied to crimes such as theft, perjury, and forgery—crimes for which blacks were convicted far more often than whites.

Lawmakers made no secret of their motivations. During the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1901, Delegate Carter Glass—who would later become Senator Glass, co-sponsor of the Glass-Steagall Act—praised felon disenfranchisement as a plan to “eliminate the darkey as a political factor in this state in less than five years.” The view among many white Southerners was that the 15th Amendment was a mistake that needed correcting. “We do not believe that the colored man is the equal of the white man,” Delegate R.L. Gordon said during that same convention. “I wish to put myself on record here as being opposed to what is known as manhood suffrage,” he

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 13

continued. “I believe the right to vote … is not a right but a privilege.”

From the beginning of the 20th century through the civil-rights revolution, most felon disenfranchisement laws remained on the books. There were a handful of legal challenges, most unsuccessful. One exception was the case of a Knoxville, Tennessee, man named Cornelius “Canary” Curtis, who lost his voting rights after a larceny conviction in 1907. Seven years later, Curtis petitioned for the restoration of his rights of citizenship and was twice denied by local courts.

But he took his case to the Tennessee Court of Civil Appeals, which ruled in his favor. Even so, the state’s law was unaffected; the ruling applied to Curtis alone.

The civil-rights laws of the 1960s revolutionized the world of black political participation. The 1965 Voting Rights Act enfranchised more than 20 million people and reopened elective office to African Americans. Within one generation in the former Confederacy, African American voter registration more than doubled from an average of 30 percent to 65 percent. The number of black elected officials jumped from practically none in 1964 to more than 9,000 in 2000, with two-thirds of them residing in the South.

Most of the South’s restrictive voting laws were outlawed and overturned by the courts—but for the most part, felony disenfranchisement measures were not. In the 1974 case Richardson v. Ramirez, the Supreme Court ruled that denying felons the right to vote was permitted under Section 2 of the 14th Amendment. Section 2 spells out penalties for states that deny citizens the right to vote for any reason “except for participation in rebellion, or other crime.”

Because of that exemption, the Court determined that—unlike with other voting laws—states did not have to prove they had a “compelling interest” in denying felons the vote, making these laws tough to challenge.

Six years later, the justices set the bar even higher, ruling that it wasn’t enough for plaintiffs

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TOP 5 STATES

with the most disenfranchised voters: ➊ Florida (1,541,602) ➋ Texas (532,487) ➌ Virginia (451,471) ➍ Tennessee (341,815) ➎ California (278,477) 2010 numbers

In many states, ex-felons like Windom E. Smith must apply for the restoration of their voting rights.

challenging the laws to prove that they had discriminatory results; they also had to prove discriminatory intent.

Alabama’s law, which stripped voting rights from those who committed crimes of “moral turpitude,” was overturned because the Court found that the intentionally vague term was meant to target black voters. But for the most part, legal challenges have proved vexingly difficult. One result: In the nearly 50 years since the Voting Rights Act was passed, the number of legally disenfranchised blacks has actually increased, thanks to felony laws interacting with a justice system that disproportionately locks up African Americans.

FOR THOSE WHO WANT to end this

last vestige of Jim Crow, the past two decades have brought decidedly mixed news. On the one hand, nine states—including the South’s two largest—have repealed or amended lifetime disenfranchisement laws since the late 1990s. In 1997, the Texas Legislature—under Governor George W. Bush—ended its two-year waiting period for regaining eligibility after release, restoring rights to 317,000 citizens. Seven years later, in 2004, another Governor Bush—Jeb— ordered the state clemency board to

simplify Florida’s procedure, leading to the restoration of voting rights for 152,000 people.

But after the Tea Party wave election of 2010, Republicans in several states began to call again for stricter disenfranchisement. In Florida, Republican Governor Rick Scott reversed the reforms that had smoothed the process for ex-felons and added a five-year period for rights restoration for nonviolent felonies, and a seven-year period for violent ones and other serious crimes. One in ten voting-age Floridians now lacks voting rights as a result of past crimes.

Florida’s harsh disenfranchisement laws are reflected in another stark statistic—more than 25 percent of all disenfranchised Americans reside in the state.

In North Carolina, where ex-felons are granted voting rights after completing parole or probation, Republican lawmakers began pushing one of the nation’s toughest laws this spring. It would impose a five-year waiting period and then require the ex-felons to present affidavits from two registered voters vouching for their “upstanding moral character” and win unanimous approval from their local board of elections. The bill’s primary sponsor, state Senator E.S. “Buck” Newton, told Raleigh’s News & Observer that he considered it a lenient measure, because “the vast majority of people I have spoken to regarding election laws think convicted felons should not be able to vote at all.” Newton’s bill is part of a broad push by the state’s GOP legislators to reduce minority voting. Other proposals would shorten early voting, end same-day registration and Sunday voting, and impose a strict voter-ID requirement at the polls—­ all of which would disproportionately affect black voters.

Another Southern Republican, Virginia’s Governor Bob McDonnell, has taken the opposite tack. Lifetime disenfranchisement remains in the state constitution, but there has been a slow march to reform under McDonnell, who has made the restoration of rights an issue since he served in the state legislature. In 2010, he streamlined the rights-restoration process, shortening

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States of Disenfranchisement

Kentucky was the first state to enact a law that denied voting rights to criminals, in 1792. Disenfranchisement laws spread to other states throughout the 19th century and became popular in the South after Reconstruction, when they were used to prevent African Americans from voting. Four states, including Kentucky, still disenfranchise convicted felons for life. But felons lose their voting rights for some period of time in all but two states. The laws vary widely—and so, therefore, does the number of felons who lose the vote from state to state.

IOWA: Iowa established criminal disenfranchisement in 1846 and continued to strip voting rights from felons until 2005, when the law was repealed by Democratic Governor Tom Vilsack, allowing around 80,000 felons to vote. In 2011, the law was reinstated by Republican Governor Terry Branstad. Since then, 21,888 Iowans have lost the right to vote.

KENTUCKY: Felons may only regain voting rights by order of the governor. In addition, anyone convicted of a “high misdemeanor,” a term that is largely undefined by Kentucky’s constitution, also must apply for an executive pardon.

ALABAMA: Though some convicted felons may apply to have their vote restored, those convicted of murder, rape, incest, sexual crimes against children, or treason have their vote revoked without hope of re-enfranchisement by the state.

MISSOURI : Felons have their voting rights restored in Missouri after their jail time, parole, and probation are complete, but certain “election-related” misdemeanors and felonies may result in permanent disenfranchisement. The law does not specify what those crimes are.

m a p d ata s o u r c e : t h e s e n t e n c i n g p r o j e c t / p r o c o n . o r g ; i o wa . g o v ; t h e b r e n n a n c e n t e r

MISSISSIPPI : Those convicted of certain felonies—ranging from murder to timber larceny to receiving stolen property—lose the vote for life, with one exception: They can still vote for president.

the waiting period for nonviolent felons and implementing a faster turnaround for processing their applications.

By this year, his administration had restored the civil rights of nearly 5,000 felons, more than any governor in state history. In late May, McDonnell took a much bigger step, announcing that he would automatically restore the rights of all nonviolent felons (though his office will still review each application individually). The order, which excludes some drug crimes, could cover more than 100,000 exfelons. That’s less than a quarter of the state’s 450,000 disenfranchised citizens, but voting-rights advocates celebrated McDonnell’s action as a step forward. “Any way you slice this, it’s huge,” says Judith Browne Dianis of the Advancement Project, a civilrights group. “We’ve pushed on past governors to do an executive order, and we couldn’t get it.”

A month before McDonnell’s action, another state liberalized its

■ Voting rights restored

■ Permanent disenfranchisement

for felony convictions, unless rights are restored by the state

■ Permanent disenfranchisement for

at least some criminal convictions, unless restored by the state

upon completion of prison sentence, parole, and probation.

(Nebraska imposes a two-year waiting period after the sentence is completed.)

■ Voting rights restored after release from prison

and discharge from parole

■ Voting rights restored after release from prison ■ No disenfranchisement for people with criminal

law: Delaware, which had imposed a five-year waiting period on ex-felons, now has no waiting period, thanks to a constitutional amendment passed by lawmakers in April. The provision applies to all felons except those convicted of murder, public corruption, or sex crimes. “They’re back, they’re working, they’re paying taxes, they’re paying rent or mortgage or whatever it might be,” said Representative Helene Keeley, the state lawmaker who sponsored the amendment. “They’re full members of society, so they should have the right to vote.”

With forward movement in some states and backsliding in others, the future of felony voting laws is murky.

The Supreme Court’s decision in June to overturn Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act was a gut punch to reformers. Under Section 4, most Southern states were required to seek Justice Department preapproval for any changes to their voting laws to ensure they weren’t discriminatory. In recent

FLORIDA: All convicted felons may apply to the governor to reinstate their vote after a five-year waiting period. Those convicted of “serious” felonies such as murder, assault, and arson, must wait seven years and then face a clemency board.

convictions

IN FLORIDA:

10.4% of the voting population is disenfranchised

23.3% of the black voting population is disenfranchised 2010 numbers

years, the department has blocked strict voter-ID laws that targeted minorities in states like Texas and South Carolina. The same day that the court announced its ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott announced that his state’s voter-ID law would now be implemented; in just the next few days, five other Southern states also began to move ahead with restrictive voting laws.

With the GOP controlling nearly every Southern legislature, momentum may now swing to the side of those who—like the Redeemers of the 19th century—want to make voting a privilege for some, not a right for all.

Voting-rights and civil-rights groups will be playing defense, fighting new restrictions in the states freed from preapproval. When the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act is commemorated in 2015, at least one major element of Jim Crow will remain very much alive. 

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 15

THE NEW SOCIALISTS

MARK KIRK

The Illinois senator’s debilitating stroke in 2012 gave him new appreciation for Medicaid, a program he previously advocated cutting.

Kirk now worries the program doesn’t provide adequate rehabilitation for stroke victims.

SARAH PALIN

The former Alaska governor has long called for cutting government funding to social programs, with a notable exception: the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Her son Trig has Down syndrome.

JAMES INHOFE

In January, the senator from Oklahoma joined 36 other Republicans to vote against an aid package for victims of Superstorm Sandy. In May, however, he called for federal help for his tornado-ravaged state.

DICK CHENEY

State ballot referendums banning gay marriage galvanized Republican turnout in the 2004 presidential race. In 2009, Cheney endorsed gay marriage on a state-by-state basis. One of his daughters is a lesbian.

When they have a personal problem that only the government can remedy, some conservatives become ardent statists.

ART BY STEVE BRODNER

ROB PORTMAN

Opposed to same-sex marriage and gay parents’ adopting children until his son came out publicly last year, the Ohio senator now argues that the government shouldn’t prevent a committed couple from marrying.

CINDY MCCAIN

Like her husband, Senator John McCain of Arizona, she believes in limited government spending. Nevertheless, she campaigns for federal research into migraine headaches, from which she suffers.

NANCY REAGAN

She was first lady when President Ronald Reagan ended federal support of research into embryonic stem cells. After he developed Alzheimer’s, she became a passionate advocate for federally funding the study of stem cells.

CHRIS CHRISTIE

The New Jersey governor is a deficit hawk, but when Hurricane Sandy devastated his state, he lobbied for a $60.4 billion federal aid package.

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Our Passivity Surplus As recent calamities show, change takes empathy— plus insisting on making yourself heard.

BY R I C H Y E S E L S O N

O

nce in a while, disparate news events make visible a thematic convergence, something wonderful or disturbing that had been coursing unseen through the culture.

Since the mass murder of 26 children and educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the nation’s attention has frequently been riveted by events that call into question what we owe to one another and what we owe to ourselves.

Can we, like the inspiring, relentless parents of those dead kids, rouse ourselves to care about our fate?

Recently, two terrible yet at least partially hopeful episodes occurred: one in a familiar American city, the other thousands of miles from the U.S. We were horrified to learn of the kidnapping, torture, and sexual assault of three girls (now women) over a ten-year period by Ariel Castro, a middle-aged man seemingly as nondescript as his house in Cleveland. Charles Ramsey, a generous, charismatic neighbor in a down-on-its-heels neighborhood, heard a cry for help and helped kick in a door. (Yes, Ramsey has his own record of domestic abuse, but let’s praise him for what he did here and hope he is a better man than he once was.)

Many have remarked on the explicit, unmediated wit Ramsey displayed in media interviews and even in his call to 911, blasting through protocol to communicate the necessary details. At the end, the operator asked Ramsey whether Amanda Berry, one of the missing girls, needed an ambulance. Ramsey replied, “She needs everything. She’s in a panic, bro. I think she’s been kidnapped, so, you know, put yourself in her shoes.”

Put yourself in her shoes: With that resonant phrase, Ramsey, a black man rescuing a white woman, demonstrated a kind of social empathy that too often does not exist in American life. I have had debates with people who oppose a program of universal health insurance who will say, bluntly, “I’m not interested

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in what strangers have or don’t have.

All I care about is myself and my family.” Because these people have taxdeductible employer-­provided health care, they are members of what Paul Starr has called “the protected public” a phrase that applies, in the wealthiest country in the world, to the majority of Americans. Even following a massive recession, most of us have enough of the essentials of life to get by.

To be protected, or to imagine oneself protected, is comforting. Some conservative thinkers believe that such passivity is the paradoxical symptom of a healthy political culture. George Will has argued that a smaller voting turnout indicates that the electorate is content. In a profoundly balkanized nation, Ramsey put the lie to that cramped sentiment. Sometimes, contentment is not enough.

In Bangladesh, meanwhile, more than 1,100 workers died in the clothing-­factory collapse near Dhaka that supplied retailers like Benetton, Primark, and Bonmarché. A corrupt owner had illegally added three extra floors to the top of the building, structurally weakening it. Pretty much everyone in North America and Western Europe is affluent by the standards of Bangladesh. We appreciate the efficiencies of the global supply chain that provide us with cheap clothing. Are we able to put ourselves in the shoes of the victims of this catastrophe? Does it matter if we do? Or is that merely a kind of moral vanity, easy for prosperous people to indulge in? Some activists have advocated boycotting the Western companies that subcontract substandard Bangladeshi garment factories. T.A. Frank in The New Republic has argued that our large retailers should adopt legally binding disclosures. Frank proposes that “Congress should require any business that places orders for more than $100,000 worth of goods from a foreign vendor hire labor monitors to monitor

A house fire caused by the nearby West Fertilizer plant explosion in April

the factories involved and make the results of their findings available to the public online.” It’s a great idea that would make garment importers more accountable to American consumers.

The real Western leverage, however, is coming from large international labor federations. Despite the decline of unions in the U.S. and much of the world, these federations have banked a still-substantial institutional social power, and they have been pressuring clothing retailers to take responsibility for working conditions in Bangladesh.

(It should be noted that many of these unions aren’t even retail or clothing unions—labor solidarity, at its best, extends to workers of any kind anywhere in the world.)

While Westerners wonder what they should do, Bangladeshis have fiercely acted on their own behalf. As Vijay Prashad noted in The Guardian, unions and political organizing on the left have a strong history in Bangladesh dating to the nation’s founding in 1971. Even as Bangladesh became one of the top garment manufacturers in the world, heavily dependent on that export trade, its workers have

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sought higher wages and safer working conditions. In the past couple of years, garment-worker activism had been escalating in the wake of layoffs, not to mention the frequent fires and accidents that plague the industry.

Unions and other organizations had led massive street demonstrations day after day. In the wake of the fire, responding to citizen pressure, the government has announced that garment workers will get a raise. (They currently are paid less than any other garment workers in the world.) It has also made legal the right of workers in the garment industry to organize unions without the permission of the owners of the garment factories. Feeling the heat from labor federations like UNI Global Union and Industrial ALL , Swedish retailer H&M has announced it will spearhead a fire-and-buildingsafety accord and seek the agreement of other major retailers. A horrific catastrophe, born of a lazy contempt for human life, is being met with a cry of resistance. State and private authorities, out of self-interested fear of unrest or more humane impulses, are responding. But American firms

We are lucky when we can view the world rather than act in it. But sometimes more is needed.

like Wal-Mart and the Gap are resisting signing the accord, and the activism of Bangladesh workers and their foreign union supporters will no doubt be needed for a long time. In late June, the Obama administration announced it would suspend trade to Bangladesh.

But there is another recent event about which Americans seem stirred neither to put themselves in another’s shoes nor march in their own. To some extent—somewhere between the Boston Marathon bombing and Bangladesh and Cleveland—the media lost sight of the West, Texas, fertilizer-­ factory explosion. Fourteen people died, and 200 were injured. Nearly 140 homes in the adjacent neighborhood were damaged, many decimated. Following the explosion, it was revealed that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the workplace safety regulatory agency, had not fully inspected the site in 28 years (a partial inspection occurred in 2011).

The reaction of those who work at West Fertilizer, live near it, and survived the harrowing experience of volunteering to rescue the trapped or tame the fire has been strikingly dissimilar to that of the Bangladeshis. A few scattered lawsuits are in motion, but nobody is in the streets demanding safer factories. Few seem to be blaming 83-year-old Donald Adair— owner of the factory since 2004 and a church elder and lifetime area resident described by locals in recent articles as “honest and good”—for storing more than 1,300 times the amount of ammonium nitrate required for such a facility to self-report to the Department of Homeland Security. Good man though he may be, Adair reportedly carried only $1 million in liability insurance, woefully inadequate to cover the explosion’s enormous damage.

A week after the explosion, The New York Times ran a long story about its aftermath. Texas is the U.S. state with the highest worker fatalities. It does not have a state fire code; neither does McLennan County have a county fire code, a requirement that experts say would vastly upgrade the safety of facilities like the one in West. “There has been nobody saying anything about more regulations,” the cousin of two brothers who were victims of the

explosion told the Times reporter. A week after the explosion, the state legislature put a stop to a bill that would have provided $60 million in training and assistance for volunteer firefighters. “Businesses can come down here and do pretty much what they want to,” said the senior executive editor of Texas Monthly. “That is the Texas way.”

You might call the support that West, Texas, residents have generally given to the fertilizer factory owner its own kind of social empathy: people imagining that if they were the owner, they pretty much would have done what Adair had done. But despite our congenial associations with the word “neighbor”—from Mr. Rogers to The Simpsons’ Ned Flanders—we would be wise to remember that neighbors can be negligent, even dangerous.

Three weeks after the fire in West, Texas, a now former paramedic, who went to the scene of the explosion, was charged with carrying materials that could produce a pipe bomb. This arrest might tidily resolve the questions about what caused the explosion.

Perhaps, however, at some point, the people of Texas will have to decide if they wish to demand something— anything—better than this from government and business.

You can put yourself in other people’s shoes. You can protest on the street in your own shoes, or rush to a locked doorway and scream for help.

You can hope that the people with the biggest pair of shoes in town do the right thing. The question is, what happens when they don’t? What happens when Congress can’t bring itself to adopt the most minimal measures to mitigate gun violence? In Connecticut, grieving parents decided to use the power of their unthinkable experience to start down the long road of changing public policy. In Cleveland, a cry for help from a white woman—a solitary feat of survival—brought the support of a black man, a solitary act of social empathy. In Bangladesh, workers are insisting that their lives must not be tossed away like old T-shirts.

We are lucky when we can view the world rather than act in it. But sometimes more is needed. Sometimes, no matter which side of it we’re standing on, we need to knock a door down. 

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THE LIFE AND DEATH OF CRYSTAL WILSON FOR MOST AMERICANS, LIFE EXPECTANCY CONTINUES TO RISE—BUT NOT FOR UNEDUCATED WHITE WOMEN. THEY HAVE LOST FIVE YEARS, AND NO ONE KNOWS WHY.

BY MONICA POTTS

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 21

nephews, cousins’ kids, and, more recently, the days she baby-sat Kelly. She was a mother hen, people said of Crystal. She’d wanted a house full of children, but she’d only had one.

The picture the family chose for her obituary shows Crystal and her husband holding the infant. Crystal leans in from the side, with dark, curly hair, an unsmiling round face, and black eyebrows knit together.

She was 38 and bore an unhealthy heft, more than 200 pounds. Crystal had been to the doctor, who told her she was overweight and diabetic. She was waiting to get medicine, but few in her family knew it, and no one thought she was near death.

Crystal’s 17-year-old daughter, Megan, split her time between her parents’ house in Cave City, Arkansas, and that of her boyfriend, Corey, in nearby Evening Shade.

Megan made sure that each set of grandparents could spend time with the baby.

The night before Crystal’s death, Megan and Corey were moving with his parents to a five-acre patch near Crystal. Megan and Corey were running late, so they didn’t pick the baby up until 11 P.M. Crystal seemed fine.

“You couldn’t tell she was sick,” Megan says.

“She never felt sick.” They went back home, and Megan got a text from her mom around midnight. “She said she loved me, give Kelly kisses, and give Corey hugs and tell him to take care of her girls and she’d see me in the morning. I was supposed to drop Kelly off at ten o’clock and finish moving.”

Instead, at around 9:30 the next morning, when Megan was getting ready to leave, Corey’s grandfather called and said Crystal was dead.

Megan didn’t believe him. If one of her parents passed, it had to be her dad. “I thought it was my dad that died because he was always the unhealthy one.” Megan left Kelly with her moth-

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er-in-law and raced with Corey and his dad in the truck, hazards on, laying on the horn, and pulled into the dirt driveway outside her parents’ tan-and-brown single-wide trailer. “Daddy was sitting there in the recliner crying,” Megan

Crystal & Possum with Kelly says. “It was Momma gone, not him.” Crystal had died in her bed early in the morning.

Just after 10 A.M., nearly every relative Crystal had was in the rutted driveway in front of the trailer. Crystal was the last of six children and considered the baby of the family. She was the third sibling to die. Her brother Terry, the “Big Man,” who hosted all the holiday dinners and coached the family softball team, had died three months earlier at age 47, and her sister Laura, whom everybody called Pete, died at age 45 in 2004. The police—dozens, it seemed, from the county and from the town—had arrived and blocked off the bedroom where she lay and were interviewing people to figure out what had killed her.

The coroner arrived and pronounced Crystal dead at 11:40. Her body was rolled out on a gurney and shipped to the state lab in Little Rock. One of the officers, Gerald Traw, later told me an autopsy is routine when someone dies without a doctor present. “We like to know why somebody died,” he says.

EVERYTHING ABOUT CRYSTAL’S life was

ordinary, except for her death. She is one of a demographic—white women who don’t graduate from high school—whose life expectancy has declined dramatically over the past 18 years. These women can now expect to die five years earlier than the generation before them.

It is an unheard-of drop for a wealthy country in the age of modern medicine. Throughout history, technological and scientific innovation have put death off longer and longer, but the benefits of those advances have not been shared equally, especially across the race and class divides that characterize 21st-­century America. Lack of access to education, medical care, good wages, and healthy food isn’t just leaving the worst-off Americans behind. It’s killing them.

The journal Health Affairs reported the five-year drop in August. The article’s lead author, Jay Olshansky, who studies human longevity at the University of Illinois at Chicago, with a team of researchers looked at death rates for different groups from 1990 to 2008. White men without highschool diplomas had lost three years of life expectancy, but it was the decline for women like Crystal that made the study news. Previous studies had shown that the least-educated whites began dying younger in the 2000s, but only by about a year. Olshansky and his colleagues did something the other studies hadn’t: They isolated high-school dropouts and measured their outcomes instead of lumping them in with high-school graduates who did not go to college.

The last time researchers found a change of this magnitude, Russian men had lost seven years after the fall of the Soviet Union, when they began drinking more and taking on other risky behaviors. Although women generally outlive men in the U.S., such a large decline in

p h o t o t h i s pa g e c o u r t e s y o f t h e w i l s o n fa m i ly ; pa g e 2 0 : s o u r c e p h o t o b y t o n y t r e m b l ay / i s t o c k p h o t o

O

n the night of May 23, 2012, which turned out to be the last of her life, Crystal Wilson baby-sat her infant granddaughter, Kelly. It was how she would have preferred to spend every night. Crystal had joined Facebook the previous year, and the picture of her daughter cradling the newborn in the hospital bed substituted for a picture of herself. Crystal’s entire wall was a catalog of visits from her nieces,

the average age of death, from almost 79 to a little more than 73, suggests that an increasing number of women are dying in their twenties, thirties, and forties. “We actually don’t know the exact reasons why it’s happened,” Olshansky says. “I wish we did.”

Most Americans, including high-school dropouts of other races, are gaining life expectancy, just at different speeds. Absent a war, genocide, pandemic, or massive governmental collapse, drops in life expectancy are rare.

“If you look at the history of longevity in the United States, there have been no dramatic negative or positive shocks,” Olshansky says.

“With the exception of the 1918 influenza pandemic, everything has been relatively steady, slow changes. This is a five-year drop in an 18-year time period. That’s dramatic.”

Researchers had known education was linked to longer life since the 1960s, but it was difficult to tell whether it was a proxy for other important factors—like coming from a wealthy family or earning a high income as an adult. In 1999, a Columbia economics graduate student named Adriana LlerasMuney decided to figure out if education was the principal cause. She found that each additional year of schooling added about a year of life. Subsequent studies suggested the link was less direct. Education is strongly associated with a longer life, but that doesn’t mean that every year of education is an elixir. “It is the biggest association, but it is also the thing that we measure about people the best,” Lleras-­ Muney says. “It is one of those things that we can collect data on. There could be other things that matter a lot more, but they’re just very difficult to measure.”

As is often the case when researchers encounter something fuzzy, they start suggesting causes that sound decidedly unscientific. Their best guess is that staying in school teaches people to delay gratification. The more educated among us are better at forgoing pleasurable and possibly risky behavior because we’ve learned to look ahead to the future. That connection isn’t new, however, and it wouldn’t explain why the least-educated whites like Crystal are dying so much younger today than the same group was two decades ago.

IT’S LONG BEEN KNOWN THAT HIGH-SCHOOL DROPOUTS ARE UNLIKELY TO LIVE AS LONG AS PEOPLE WHO HAVE GONE TO COLLEGE. BUT WHY? CAVE CITY GIVES ITSELF the low-stakes title

of “Home of the World’s Sweetest Watermelons.”

Beneath the ground, the Crystal River carves out the caverns that lend the town its name.

Above it, 1,900 people live in single-wides in neighborhoods dotted with fenced lawns or along spindly red-dirt trails off the main highway. In this part of Arkansas, the Ozark Plateau flattens to meet the Mississippi embayment, and the hills give way to rice paddies. About 17,000 people live in Sharp County, a long string of small towns with Cave City at the bottom and the Missouri border at the top. Most of the residents are white—96 percent—with a median household income of $29,590. Nearly a quarter live in poverty, and Crystal was among them; for most of her married life, she relied on income from her husband’s disability checks.

For work, people drive to the college town of Batesville, about 20 minutes south, which has a chicken-processing plant that periodically threatens to close and an industrial bakery with 12-hour shifts that make it hard for a mother to raise children. Less than 13 percent of county residents have a bachelor’s degree.

Society is divided into opposites: Godly folk go to church and sinners chase the devil, students go to college and dropouts seek hard labor, and

men call the shots and women cook for them.

Crystal’s parents, Junior and Martha Justice, had moved to the area when her three oldest siblings were still toddlers. “My aunt told my dad that he could make better money up here, but it wasn’t so,” says Linda Holley, one of Crystal’s sisters. Junior farmed, which fed his family and brought in a little money. He found a piece of land on a country road called Antioch and bought a prefabricated home from the Jim Walters company. It was on this land they had their next three children. Crystal, born July 6, 1973, was the sixth and youngest.

Their life was old-school country. They raised chickens and goats and grew their own vegetables. The house was small, with only three bedrooms. Crystal’s closest sibling, Terry, was 7 years older. Linda was a full 15 years older than Crystal, which made her more like a second mom than a sister. When Crystal was two, Linda’s twin sister, Pete, began having children and, fleeing a string of abusive relationships, turned over custody to her parents. Having four slightly younger nieces and nephews in the house gave Crystal playmates her own age.

It was Linda, the doting older sister and aunt, who would take all the kids to Dogpatch, a creaky little Ozarks amusement park based on the comic strip, with actors playing Daisy Mae and Li’l Abner. Linda keeps Polaroids of Crystal from that time. They show her with long, curly blond hair and often half-clothed, happy, covered in clay and mud. “Grandpa used to call her his little Shirley Temple,” says Crystal’s niece, Lori.

When Crystal was starting out in elementary school, the family moved to a trailer to be closer to town. Her dad worked occasionally for lumber companies, and the proximity made jobs easier to find. Crystal was well behaved in school, and teachers would ask Lori, only two years behind, “Why aren’t you like her, she was so quiet and shy?” Crystal loved basketball and, especially, softball, which she played in summer clubs even as an adult. As she got older, her hair darkened and she became stocky and muscular. She played ball like a bulldozer and was aggressive on the field and mouthy off. The whole family would play and bicker and joke.

Crystal would smack people across the butt

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 23

with the bat if they weren’t moving fast enough.

“It wasn’t until we got in high school that I realized she was struggling so bad in school,” Lori says. “I was in the seventh grade, and she was in the ninth, and I wasn’t really smart myself. But I could help her do some of her work.” In 1988, Junior died from lung cancer at age 55. Both he and Martha were smokers.

The next year Crystal met Carl Wilson, whom everybody called Possum. He was related to a cousin through marriage and, at 28, was 12 years her senior. They kept their relationship secret for a few months. “He came up to see her at the school,” Lori says. “So I pretty much put two and two together. I was the one that told my grandmother.” Lori thought that would put an end to it; instead, Martha let them marry.

According to Linda, Martha had one admonition for Possum: “Momma said, ‘As long as you take care of her and don’t hit her, you have my permission.’ He done what he could do for her.

They was mates.”

Possum moved in with the family in the trailer. He and Crystal had one room, Martha another, and the four nephews and nieces shared two bunk beds in the third. Crystal dropped out in the tenth grade because she had married. That was the way things were.

None of Crystal’s siblings finished high school.

Instead, they became adults when they were teenagers. Crystal would spend the rest of her years as a housewife to a husband who soon became ill and as a mother to a daughter who would grow up as fast as she did.

RESEARCHERS HAVE LONG known that high-

school dropouts like Crystal are unlikely to live as long as people who have gone to college. But why would they be slipping behind the generation before them? James Jackson, a public-health researcher at the University of Michigan, believes it’s because life became more difficult for the least-educated in the 1990s and 2000s. Broad-scale shifts in society increasingly isolate those who don’t finish high school from good jobs, marriageable partners, and healthier communities. “Hope is lowered.

If you drop out of school, say, in the last 20 years or so, you just had less hope for ever making it and being anything,” Jackson says.

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SUCH A LARGE DROP IN LIFE EXPECTANCY SUGGESTS THAT AN INCREASING NUMBER OF WOMEN ARE DYING IN THEIR TWENTIES AND THIRTIES. “The opportunities available to you are very different than what they were 20 or 30 years ago. What kind of job are you going to get if you drop out at 16? No job.”

In May, Jennifer Karas Montez of the Harvard University Center for Population and Development Studies co-authored the first paper investigating why white women without high-school diplomas might be dying.

Most research has looked at which diseases are the cause of death, but Montez and her co-author wanted to tease out quality of life: economic indicators like employment and income, whether women were married and how educated their spouses were, and health behaviors like smoking and alcohol abuse. It is well known that smoking shortens life; in fact, smoking led to the early deaths of both of Crystal’s parents and her sister and brother.

Crystal, though, never smoke or drank. But the researchers discovered something else that was driving women like her to early graves: Whether the women had a job mattered, and it mattered more than income or other signs of financial stability, like homeownership. In fact, smoking and employment were the only two factors of any significance.

At first, Montez and her co-author suspected

that women who are already unhealthy are less able to work and so are already more likely to die. When they investigated that hypothesis, however, it didn’t hold up. Jobs themselves contributed something to health. But what?

It could be, the authors suggested, that work connects women to friends and other social networks they otherwise wouldn’t have. Even more squishy sounding, Montez wrote that jobs might give women a “sense of purpose.”

Better-educated women are the most likely to work and to achieve parity with men: Seventy-­t wo percent are in the workforce, compared with 81 percent of their male counter­parts. Women without high-school diplomas are the least likely to work. Only about a third are in the workforce, compared to about half of their male counterparts. If they do find work, women are more likely than men to have minimum-wage jobs. They account for most workers in the largest lowpaying occupations—child-care providers, housecleaners, food servers. Even if they do have minimum-wage jobs, this group of women is more likely to leave the labor force to take care of young children because child care is prohibitively expensive.

Montez’s joblessness study, however, raised more questions. Would any job do? What does giving women a “sense of purpose” mean? And why would joblessness hit white women harder than other groups? Overall, men lost more jobs during the Great Recession. Why are women losing years at a faster rate?

CAVE CITY LIFE REVOLVES around its rivers,

thick with runoff from the mountains and barreling toward the Mississippi. Crystal loved the area, but she also didn’t know anything else. She hunted squirrels and rabbits in the fall, but spring was filled with what she loved most. School ends, and softball season begins.

It is a brief, lovely time, before humidity and mosquitoes, when the world smells of wildflowers and dirt and storms. Every year, one of Crystal’s brothers made sure she had a fishing license for the spring-swollen White River and the less touristy Black River, where they had better hauls. People come from around the state to float lazily, drunkenly down the

d av i d i a d / w i k i m e d i a

rivers in canoes and rafts. Songbirds come too—buntings, mockingbirds, whippoorwills, woodpeckers—settling in for the season near the quieter streams, ponds, and water-filled rice paddies. Deer fill the kudzu-covered woods. Copperhead snakes awakened from hibernation nest in muddy puddles.

Crystal wanted to start a family as soon as she was married but couldn’t. Her first three pregnancies, in the early ’90s, ended in miscarriages. The first two occurred so late she gave the babies names, Justin and Crystal; the last was a set of twins. None of her relatives knew if she ever went to a doctor to find out why she miscarried. “I just thought maybe it was one of those things, you know, some people can have them and carry them and some can’t,” Lori says. Megan said her mother had had “female cancer,” a catchall phrase for cervical cancer and the infections and dysplasia leading up to it.

When Lori’s son was born, Crystal teased her about stealing him.

She was always volunteering to baby-sit the kids in the family.

When Crystal finally got pregnant with Megan, no one was sure she would make it, least of all Crystal and Possum. “They ended up just praying for me,” Megan says. She was born July 20, 1994, and became the center of Crystal’s world.

By the time Megan was born, Crystal and Possum were living in their own trailer but were struggling financially. Possum had worked the first four years of their marriage at the chicken-processing plant before quitting for good because of health problems. An accident on an oil rig when he was a teenager had left him with a plate in his skull. Chickenprocessing plants are tough places to work, and besides, he qualified for disability. Crystal spent her life taking him to specialists—he was covered by Medicaid—but the problems piled up. He had a congenital heart condition and a bad back. A young-old man.

When Megan was 12, Crystal worked for a brief spell as a housekeeper at a nursing home

in Cave City, where Linda and Lori worked.

Mostly, though, she stayed home to take care of Possum and Megan. Baby-sitting brought in small amounts of cash, but she and Possum relied on disability, which was about $1,000 a month. Outside of a brief trip to Texas after Megan was born to show her off to Possum’s family, and a trip to a small town near St. Louis to visit a niece after one of the trailers they lived in burned down, Crystal passed her entire life in Cave City.

Crystal spent what money she had on Megan.

She gave her any new toy she wanted and, later, name-brand clothes, a four-wheeler, a laptop,

and a phone. When Megan started playing softball, Crystal spent money on shoes, gloves, and club fees. “Crystal was a super mom,” says Steve Green, the school superintendent and Megan’s softball coach. “They didn’t have a lot of revenue, but they put everything they had into Megan.” Crystal and Possum made it to every practice and every game, even if it meant driving for an hour, deep into the mountains. They brought snacks and sports drinks for Megan’s teammates. Crystal would watch her nieces, nephews, and cousins’ kids play, and she still played for her family team in Batesville. Crystal went with Linda to a missionary Baptist church near the family road in Antioch, but she and Possum weren’t everySunday Christians—it was the softball field her spring weekends revolved around. But when

Terry was diagnosed with cancer in 2009, the family stopped playing, and Crystal lost her favorite activity.

When her relatives look back, they think Crystal was probably lonely. Her mother had died three years after Megan was born.

Although she and Possum had a Ford Contour, Crystal seldom drove, relying on relatives to come by to take her to the grocery store. It was a chance to visit. When Linda’s daughter took her truck-driver husband to pick up his 18-wheeler for his next haul, Crystal would always want to go with them. She would call her family members throughout the day, gossiping. She didn’t stir up trouble, but she reveled in drama. Crystal would often go to Linda’s for homemade biscuits and gravy for breakfast, and she’d ask Linda to buy her liter bottles of Dr Pepper whenever she ran out. She was addicted to Dr Pepper. Sometimes, relatives paid for Possum’s medicine; Linda’s daughter remembers paying as much as $64 in one visit. Crystal’s nieces and nephews had gotten older and started their own families, and now she relied on them as much as she had her older siblings.

ANOTHER MYSTERY EMERGED from the lifespan study: Black women without a high-school diploma are now outliving their white counterparts.

As a group, blacks are more likely to die young, because the factors that determine wellbeing—income, education, access to health care—tend to be worse for blacks. Yet blacks on the whole are closing the life-­expectancy gap with whites. In a country where racism still plays a significant role in all that contributes to a healthier, longer life, what could be affecting whites more than blacks?

One theory is that low-income white women smoke and drink and abuse prescription drugs like OxyContin and street drugs like meth more than black women. Despite Crystal’s weight and diabetes, those problems are more common among black women and usually kill more slowly. Meth and alcohol kill quickly. It could be that white women,

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 25

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CRYSTAL’S WORLD WAS getting smaller

and smaller and more sedentary. Everyone was worried about Possum, but Crystal’s own health was bad. She’d had a cystic ovary removed when Megan was 13, and about a year before her death she had a hysterectomy.

The surgery was necessary after Crystal had started hemorrhaging, which was brought on by another miscarriage—something her family didn’t know about until the autopsy. It’s unclear when she learned she was a diabetic. Megan thinks her mom might have heard it for the first time when she was pregnant with her, but

e Crystal and Possum’s hom Crystal never had regular medical care because she didn’t qualify for Medicaid as Possum did.

Megan started spending more time away from her mom in the tenth grade, when Corey and his family moved to town. Crystal consented to their high-school romance, though she warned Corey that if he ever hit her daughter, she’d put him in the ground herself. Within a year of going out with Corey, Megan was pregnant. She swears she didn’t know it until she was seven and a half months along, when Corey’s mother made her take a pregnancy test. They had a short time to prepare for

Kelly’s birth in February 2012, but Crystal was happy about the new baby. It was a way for her to have another child. But after Kelly’s birth, Crystal and Megan argued; Megan was worried her mother would spoil Kelly.

Because Corey’s father worked, his family had a bit more money, and they bought more baby clothes than Crystal could, which only made her feel worse.

In the final months of her life, Crystal complained of chest aches, but when she went to the emergency room, the doctors assured her it wasn’t a heart attack. She said that she felt like she had the flu or allergies. In hindsight, it was after Terry’s death—he died a week after Kelly was born—when Crystal really began to suffer. He had been the linchpin of the family, and now they were breaking apart. After he died, Crystal would call Linda’s daughter and say, “I wish God would have took me instead of Terry.” Crystal posted regularly about Terry on her Facebook page. Crystal had stopped coming to Linda’s for breakfast, too, because Possum was growing sicker and had started falling when he tried to walk on his own. He was diagnosed with cancer about a week before Crystal’s death. “I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe some of it might have been attributed to her system just being drug down from having to take care of Carl and Megan,” says Steve Green, the school superintendent. “Just everyday stress.”

The night before she died, Crystal made herself a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for dinner. After Megan took Kelly home, she went to bed and fell asleep, but Possum said she woke up at 1 A.M., said she was thirsty, and went to the kitchen. She was a fitful sleeper, and she returned to bed.

When Crystal wasn’t up before him the next morning, it struck Possum as odd, but he let her sleep. Crystal usually called her relatives around 6 or 7 A.M. to see what their plans were for the day. They wondered if something was wrong when their phones didn’t beep. Finally, Possum sent in his brother, who’d been staying with them, to wake Crystal up; they were always going after each other, and he thought the teasing would spur her out of bed.

monica pot ts

as a group, are better at killing themselves.

Still, why would white women be more likely to engage in risky behaviors? Another theory is that the kind of place people live in, who is around them, and what those neighbors are doing play a central role. Health is also a matter of place and time.

In March, two researchers from the University of Wisconsin reported that women in nearly half of 3,140 counties in the United States saw their death rates rise during the same time period that Olshansky studied. The researchers colored the counties with an increase in female mortality a bright red, and the red splashed over Appalachia, down through Kentucky and Tennessee, north of the Cotton Belt, and across the Ozarks—the parts of the South where poor white people live.

Location seemed to matter more than other indicators, like drug use, which has been waning. The Wisconsin researchers recommended more studies examining “cultural, political, or religious factors.”

Something less tangible, it seems, is shaping the lives of white women in the South, beyond what science can measure.

Surely these forces weigh on black women, too, but perhaps they are more likely to have stronger networks of other women.

Perhaps after centuries of slavery and Jim Crow, black women are more likely to feel like they’re on an upward trajectory. Perhaps they have more control relative to the men in their communities. In low-income white communities of the South, it is still women who are responsible for the home and for raising children, but increasingly they are also raising their husbands. A husband is a burden and an occasional heartache rather than a helpmate, but one women are told they cannot do without. More and more, data show that poor women are working the hardest and earning the most in their families but can’t take the credit for being the breadwinners. Women do the emotional work for their families, while men reap the most benefits from marriage. The rural South is a place that often wants to remain unchanged from the 1950s and 1960s, and its women are now dying as if they lived in that era, too.

Crystal’s funeral was small, mostly attended by family, and held at the funeral home in Cave City. They buried her in a tiny graveyard next to a little white chapel on Antioch Road, near the land where Crystal was born. Megan went to stay with Corey’s family, and they offered to buy Possum a prefabricated barn so he could come live near them, but there was no need. He spent most of the next four weeks in and out of the hospital, until he died of massive heart failure on June 22. Possum was buried right beside Crystal. Both graves are marked with temporary notices. Linda has promised Megan she will help buy tombstones.

The medical examiner’s investigation into Crystal’s death was closed because it was determined she died of natural causes. The police report lists no official cause. With untreated, unmanaged diabetes, her blood would have been thick and sticky—the damage would have been building for years—and it could have caused cardiac arrest or a stroke. Linda has her own explanation: “Her heart exploded.”

And, in a way, it had.

AFTER HER MOM’S DEATH, Megan was 17,

hitched, and living on the same land where Crystal had given birth to her. Was it going to be the same life over again?

At school, a number of administrators and teachers stepped in to make sure Megan felt supported; one of them was the technology coordinator for the Cave City schools, Julie Johnson. With big gray eyes and a neat gray bob, she seems younger than 46. When I visited the school this spring, Julie showed me a picture of Megan with Kelly, Corey, and his family that Megan copied and gave to her.

They became close last winter when Julie walked into one of Megan’s classrooms and the teacher asked, “Have you congratulated Megan?” Julie turned to her and said, “What have you done, sister?” Megan told her that she’d given birth only a week before but that she’d wanted to come back to school. Julie said, “Dang, you’re tough!”

Julie has seen a lot of teen mothers. Arkansas ranks No. 1 in the country in teenage births. About a month before Megan gave birth to Kelly, another young woman from

EDUCATION IS STRONGLY ASSOCIATED WITH A LONGER LIFE, BUT IT DOESN’T MEAN THAT EVERY YEAR OF EDUCATION IS AN ELIXIR. the school had gotten married and had a baby, then died mysteriously. Nobody knew what had caused it, and the girl, Bethany, was in the back of Julie’s mind when she saw Megan. “I’ve been in education for 25 years. I kind of got a good eye and sensed where she was coming from. And I was troubled because, as I kept thinking, OK, if a teacher here at school has a baby, they have a big shower for her, and if somebody at church has a baby, they have a shower for her, but if you have a child as a child, we don’t do anything.”

She prayed on what to do, and prayed some more. It led her to start the Bethany Project, a donation program that would give Megan and other young mothers baby clothes, school supplies, and community support. Megan was only in the spring of her junior year when she had Kelly. Megan told Julie she’d promised her mother she’d stay in school—Megan told me Crystal wanted her to have a good job so she could take care of Kelly and spoil her rotten—and Julie thinks Megan’s mother-inlaw helped her uphold her promise. “Corey’s mother, I think she would have fought the devil to make sure those two finished school.” They did. Megan and Corey finished school on May 3 of this year, were married eight days later on

May 11, and then graduated on May 18, just a few days shy of the anniversary of Crystal’s death. Megan found a job at Wendy’s and plans to enroll in the community college in Batesville. Finishing college would give her the best chance to escape her mother’s fate.

Julie knows a lot of young women who will never break the cycle. She has her own thoughts about what might be dragging down their life expectancy. “Desperation,” she says.

“You look at the poverty level in this county— I love this place. It’s where I’m from. I don’t want you to think I’m being negative about it.” But she gestures toward the highway and notes how little is there: a few convenience stores, a grocery, and a nursing home. You have to drive north to the county seat in Ash Flat for a Walmart, or you can negotiate traffic in Batesville, where you might get a job at the chicken plant or a fast-food restaurant.

“If you are a woman, and you are a poorly educated woman, opportunities for you are next to nothing. You get married and you have kids. You can’t necessarily provide as well as you’d like to for those kids. Oftentimes, the way things are, you’re better off if you’re not working. You get more help. You get better care for your kids if you’re not working. It’s a horrible cycle.

“You don’t even hear about women’s lib, because that’s come and gone. But you hear about glass ceilings, and I think girls, most especially girls, have to be taught that just because they’re girls doesn’t mean they can’t do something. That they are just as smart, that they are just as valuable as males. And we have to teach boys that girls can be that way, too. They all need the love, nurturing, and support from somebody from their family or who’s not their family. Somebody who’s willing to step up. There has to be something to inspire kids to want more, to want better.

And they have to realize that they’re going to have to work hard to get it. I don’t know how you do that.

“It’s just horrible, you know? I don’t know if ‘horrible’ is the right word.” Julie puts her face into her hands. “The desperation of the times. I don’t know anything about anything, but that’s what kills them.” 

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 27

STORY

28 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JUL /AUG 2013

Over the past 20 years, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy has raised the wages of hotel workers, cleaned up the air at the harbor, restructured the trash-collection industry, and boosted domestic manufacturing.

Is the organization one of a kind—or a model for a new American liberalism?

ar agami / fotolia

B Y H A RO L D M E Y E RS O N

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 29

T

ake a left as you exit the Long Beach Airport, and you’ll pass three acres of greenery named “Rosie the Riveter Park.” The park stands at the southeast corner of what had once been the mammoth Douglas Aircraft factory, where DC-3s, -4s, -5s, all the way up to -10s, were once manufactured, and where, during World War II, 43,000 workers, half of them women, built the B-17 bombers and C-47 transports that flew missions over Europe and the Pacific.

World War II and then the Cold War remade Long Beach. Federal dollars funded the Douglas factory, a new naval shipyard, and numerous defense firms. An entire city—the working-class community of Lakewood, which borders Long Beach on the north—was built to house the sudden influx of defense workers. Long Beach became and remains the second-largest city in Los Angeles County.

The new jobs paid well; powerful unions represented the workers in the factories and on the docks. Military spending, though, began to decline after the Vietnam War, and when the Cold War ended, Long Beach and the broader Los Angeles economy took a hit from which neither has recovered. The naval shipyard closed in 1997. Douglas, Lockheed, and North American Aviation—the aircraft manufacturers that had been the region’s largest privatesector employers—downsized and eventually shuttered almost all their Southern California plants.

Long Beach and Los Angeles did not become Detroit and Cleveland—hollowed-out urban hulks. L.A. still had the entertainment and tourism industries. The rise of Asian imports created a boom at the ports. Millions of new immigrants, chiefly from Mexico, Central America, Asia, and the Pacific, came to Los Angeles and found work.

But good blue-collar jobs—the factory jobs that had paid enough to make L.A. the epicenter of America’s post–World War II boom—were largely gone. By the mid-1990s, Los Angeles had become the nation’s capital of low-wage labor and remains so to this day: Twenty-eight percent of fulltime workers in L.A. County make less than $25,000 a year. In Chicago, only 19 percent of workers earn so little.

Long Beach was especially hurt. A 2006 study found that the average wage of local manufacturing workers was $63,182—but few manufacturing workers remained. It also found that the average wage of hospitality employees— primarily hotel and restaurant workers—was $19,000.

Like its defense establishments in earlier years, Long Beach’s downtown hotels had received considerable governmental assistance. The aid for the hotels came from the city, which, seeking to boost its economy by making Long

30 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JUL /AUG 2013

Beach a tourist destination, discounted leases of municipally owned land to the hotels, subsidized their construction, and forgave the hotels’ debts. The funding added up to $114 million between 1981 and 2008. But unlike their Rosie the Riveter predecessors, the women who cleaned the rooms in Long Beach’s premier hotels brought home a pittance—roughly $9.50 an hour.

Long Beach is not famed for its liberalism. Until 15 years ago, its elected officials fell into two categories; they were either Chamber of Commerce Republicans or defense-­ oriented Democrats. But last November, Long Beach voters went to the polls and, by a margin of 64 percent to 36 percent, gave the 2,000 employees at the city’s largest hotels a raise to $13 an hour and five paid sick days. In any American city, such a measure would have been groundbreaking.

In Long Beach, it would have been inexplicable but for one all-important particular: The campaign behind the measure was the handiwork of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, commonly known by its acronym, LAANE. Established in 1993, LAANE is the think tank, policy arm, and, on occasion, political organizer for the Los Angeles labor movement. Over the past 20 years, it has become the nation’s most innovative and effective force for raising the incomes of low-wage private-sector workers. No other think tank has come up with more ways to leverage the powers of municipal government to create higher pay for America’s working class. No other community-organizing group has built more effective labor-environmental-neighborhood alliances. No other lobbyist has a better record of persuading elected officials to enact not just progressive legislation but the kind of progressive legislation that no one has ever before enacted.

Former Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Larry Frank calls LAANE “the most sophisticated and intelligent organization I’ve ever worked with when it comes to moving a policy agenda.” Frank’s is not an isolated opinion. “They’re the leader of the groups around the country working for more equitable economic development,” says Shawn Escoffery, an official with the Surdna Foundation, which has funded LAANE in recent years.

Founded and led until last year by attorney Madeline Janis, the organization first came to public notice in 1997 when it spearheaded a living-wage ordinance for employees of companies with city contracts. The legislation became the model for ordinances in more than 100 other cities. Soon after, LAANE set the template for community benefit agreements. Local governments had often compelled developers to pay their construction workers a living wage, but these agreements conditioned government assistance on businesses within the completed projects paying a living wage to their employees as well. LAANE has won such benefits—including local-hiring, living-wage, and union-­representation agreements—at many of L.A.’s mega-­developments (most prominently Staples Center, where the Lakers and Kings play). It has crafted an innercity hiring accord with the county’s transit agency, which will produce tens of thousands of jobs in the African American community. It has brought together the Teamsters, the Sierra Club, and the Natural Resources Defense Council and hammered out agreements that reduced the truck pollution around the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors by nearly 90 percent. It has restructured the city’s private trashcollection industry in Los Angeles, which will lead to more recycling and a better-paid workforce.

L A ANE ’s victories have come when American liberals are generally sunk in pessimism about the prospects for reversing the growth in economic inequality and the decline in middle-income jobs. LAANE has cracked the code for the economy’s seemingly most intractable conundrum: how to raise the incomes of American workers. It has helped win living wages for 64,000 private-sector workers. As projects subject to LAANE–devised regulations expand over the next five years, that number should rise to 95,000.

“The left consensus is that the world is collapsing, that we have no more ideas on how to fix it,” Janis says. “But we do.

We have a vision and a strategy and a practical way of realizing them. When our government invests our dollars in the private economy, we should get a return on that investment.

We should get a return in the form of living wages and in the form of clean air and parks and local hiring. Getting a return on your investment is a core capitalist concept. This is that concept but with a progressive spin.”

demographic transformations closely tracked those in the region. Between 1970 and 2010, the city grew from 359,000 residents to 462,000. Where those people came from, what they did for a living, and how they voted, however, were all radically different. In 1970, 86 percent of Long Beach residents were white. In 2010, 29 percent were white, while 41 percent were Latino, 14 percent were Asian, and 13 percent were black. Long Beach is home to more than 20,000 Filipino immigrants and their children and has more Cambodians—roughly 50,000—than any other city outside Southeast Asia.

The campaign to unionize the city’s hotel workers began in earnest in 2008, when UNITE HERE , the hotel workers’ union, persuaded the city council to mandate card-check recognition at hotels built on city-owned land. (Card check is a process in which management recognizes a union when 50 percent plus one of the workers sign affiliation cards, thereby forgoing an election in which management has the freedom to intimidate workers.) The hotels responded by

No organization has a better record of persuading elected officials to enact not just progressive legislation but the kind of progressive legislation that no one has enacted before.

ALTHOUGH LAANE HAD NOT been active in Long Beach

when it decided to mount a campaign on behalf of its hotel workers, the city wasn’t foreign terrain. Long Beach’s

placing an initiative on the ballot that repealed the council’s order. Fearing the initiative would pass, the council rescinded its card-check order.

In the wake of this defeat, LAANE believed it could persuade city voters to enact a living wage for hotel workers if it conducted the kind of community-organizing campaigns it had in Los Angeles. “It’s extremely difficult to organize an individual hotel,” says Vivian Rothstein, then LAANE’s deputy director, who oversaw its Long Beach campaign. “They’re owned by global corporations. They have no engagement with the local community. So we look to where the industry is concentrated, where it impacts the local economy. In Long Beach, our research showed that 83 percent of the employees of the downtown hotels lived in the city.”

LAANE began to build the Long Beach Coalition for Good Jobs and a Healthy Community. In 2009, LAANE’s researchers produced a 50-page paper that documented the city’s investment in tourism over the preceding 25 years, which, after factoring in the hotel-adjacent aquarium and convention center, came to three-quarters of a billion dollars. The report also revealed that Long Beach ranked eighth among

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 31

the 26 largest U.S. hotel markets in revenues per hotel room and that 41 percent of the workers at one large downtown hotel, the Hilton, received some form of public assistance.

Nikole Cababa was one of the two full-time organizers on LAANE’s campaign. Twenty-five years old, the daughter of Filipino immigrants, Cababa had grown up in Long Beach and had recently graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles. She concentrated on staging forums about the workings of the city’s economy and on mobilizing voters in a series of elections. By the time the Long Beach Coalition put its $13-an-hour initiative on the November 2012 ballot, Cababa had assembled a mélange of organizations that worked to pass the measure. One such group, Khmer Girls in Action, turned out 60 high-school students to knock on doors in the city’s Little Cambodia neighborhood. Another group, the Filipino Migrant Center, sent out canvassers who spoke to Filipino immigrants in their native Tagalog. Three hundred volunteers came out to canvass, walking precincts that had never been targeted in previous elections.

economically developed. This expands the notion of what labor organizing is. In this region, where immigrant communities are ascending at the same time they’re struggling in low-wage jobs, it’s an incredible strategy.”

It’s also a strategy—organizing workers in their communities—that unions had long rejected. When Samuel Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor in 1886, he took pains to distinguish it from its rival, the Knights of Labor, which welcomed everyone into its ranks regardless of whether they had a union in their workplace.

Gompers, by contrast, insisted that it was union representation on the job that gave employees whatever power they wielded, and for the next 120 years, the workplace remained the focus of union-organizing campaigns.

Over the past 30 years, however, such campaigns have become increasingly difficult to wage, as more and more employers have fired the workers leading those campaigns—a violation of the National Labor Relations Act but not one that incurs any serious penalties. With private-­sector unionism all but disappearing, labor is now rethinking the Gompers gospel. At its biennial convention this September, the AFL-CIO will consider opening its ranks to workers not covered by a collective-bargaining agreement. LAANE’s campaigns offer a master class in the art of collective bargaining by other means.

In the campaign to enact a living wage for Long Beach hotel workers, LAANE mobilized 60 high-school students from Khmer Girls in Action to walk precincts in Little Cambodia.

“Our campaign wasn’t about helping hotel workers as such,” Rothstein says. “It was about boosting the economic health of the whole community.” To that end, the campaign enlisted 130 small businesses; some of the proprietors became campaign spokespeople. By raising hotel workers’ incomes, they argued, the workers would have more money to “buy local.” The campaign’s polling showed it winning not just Democratic but Republican support as well. “I saw homes with Romney lawn signs that also had our ‘Buy Local’ signs,” Janis says. On Election Day, the initiative carried every council district in the city. On July 1, the higher wage went into effect. The Hyatt, which had been embroiled in a decade-long battle with UNITE HERE , allowed its workers to join the union and is now negotiating a first contract.

The coalition’s work continues. It is organizing the minority communities that helped pass the wage increase to elect their own representatives to the city council and other positions. “It’s not enough to build power in the workplace,” Rothstein says. “We have to build power for working families in their community. Working people should have a voice in how their taxes are used, in how their city is

32 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JUL /AUG 2013

LAANE WAS FOUNDED IN 1993 by three activists who in

the years following proved to be among the most creative and consequential figures in liberal America: Miguel Contreras, Maria Elena Durazo, and Madeline Janis. At the time, Contreras was a regional official of UNITE HERE; Durazo was the president of the union’s Los Angeles chapter, Local 11; and Janis was an attorney at the international law firm Latham & Watkins.

Contreras, more than anyone, transformed what had been a somnolent Los Angeles labor movement into a dynamo. A child of farmworkers, he was recruited while still in his teens by Cesar Chavez to work on the grape boycott. Forty-one years old when he, Durazo, and Janis first conceived of LAANE , Contreras combined a buoyant disposition, a sharp eye for talent, and perhaps the most farsighted strategic perspective of anyone in either California labor or politics. Three years after he helped found LAANE , he became the leader of the L.A. County Federation of Labor, the AFL-CIO umbrella group, to which more than 300 local unions, with 800,000 members, belonged.

Turning the federation into the force that mobilized the

gregg segal

region’s massive Latino and immigrant population, he also turned Los Angeles into one of America’s most progressive cities and California into a solidly Democratic state.

Maria Elena Durazo, Contreras’s wife, had wrested control of Local 11 in 1989, when she led an insurgency that ousted the chapter’s longtime and scandal-ridden president. If Contreras was the wheeler-dealer, Durazo was the crusader—firing up her members with speeches that stoked their anger and raised their hopes. With Durazo at its helm, Local 11 resumed organizing many of the city’s nonunion hotels, began conducting its meetings in Spanish as well as in English, and provided precinct walkers—in a city so vast, so carcentric, that nobody had walked precincts in years—for the candidates it backed. One year after Contreras died of a heart attack in 2005, Durazo was elected leader of the federation.

In the spring of 1993, Janis was spending time at Local 11, volunteering on the mayoral campaign of Councilman Michael Woo. Before coming to Latham & Watkins, she had been the director of CARACEN, a Los Angeles organization that advocated for refugees from the Salvadoran and Guatemalan civil wars. Durazo sat on CARECEN’s board; during the course of the Woo campaign, Contreras got to know Janis. The city had recently endured the Rodney King riots; it was hemorrhaging middleclass jobs; and Mexican and Central American migrants were flooding in and earning poverty wages working construction, busing tables, cleaning up offices and hotels, taking care of children, and manicuring lawns. Janis and Contreras, later joined by Durazo, had long discussions about how to reshape the city’s two-tier economy into something more vibrant and humane.

“Miguel and I were trying to figure out how to develop the ability to move beyond the day-to-day organizing and internal organizing that is the core of union work,” Durazo says. “We needed someone to look at other ways to grow unions and help workers. Madeline’s particular passion was helping immigrant workers. We said the focus couldn’t be just that. We challenged her to do something different.

We didn’t know exactly what she should be doing. But she agreed to take it on.”

Janis’s familiarity with a two-tiered economy predated her stints at Latham & Watkins and CARACEN. Born in 1960, she grew up in the San Fernando Valley’s upper-

middle-class neighborhoods of Granada Hills and Woodland Hills. Her father was a psychiatrist; her mother an artist and teacher. They divorced when she was ten. Three years later, she moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, with her mother, who was pursuing a master’s degree in art there. The experience shook her. “There were a lot of really poor people,” she says.

Janis attended Amherst and spent her junior year abroad in Spain. Longtime dictator Francisco Franco had died, and the country was transitioning to democracy. While she was there, military leaders mounted a failed coup against the newly elected government. For Janis, it was a turning point. “When I went back to Amherst,” she says, “I became an activist. I’d been political before but not an activist.”

In her senior year, she protested U.S. aid to the Contras in Nicaragua and apartheid in South Africa, wearing a “Free Nelson Mandela” armband at her graduation.

Madeline Janis co-founded LAANE in 1993 and served as its executive director until 2012.

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 33

Janis earned a law degree at UCLA and for a brief spell represented tenants in slum housing and the denizens of skid row. She then joined Latham & Watkins. “I wanted to pay off my loans and go to Central America,” she says.

In 1990, she became CARACEN’s director, but in 1993, she returned to Latham, where she worked under George Mihlsten, a legendary attorney and lobbyist who represented the city’s leading developers. She wanted to understand how powerful interests got the policies and deals they wanted out of city government. “What I saw,” she says, “was that developers owned city hall. They’d meet council members, money would change hands in legal ways, and the stuff they wanted to happen would happen. That led to an epiphany: We needed to bring normal people to city hall. We needed to act like city hall is the hall of democracy, where every person is welcome. We have to back that up with research, organizing, communications, but that should be our attitude.”

In its first few years, LAANE’s goals were modest. Ini-

wages or any benefits. We realized we couldn’t just win worker retention. We had to create a living wage.”

The idea of a living wage has periodically surfaced throughout American labor history. In the early 20th century, it was a battle cry of the Wobblies, the radical labor organization better known for its slogans than its contracts. In 1994, at the behest of a community organization and a municipal workers’ union, the City of Baltimore passed the first modern living-wage ordinance, which guaranteed employees of city contractors a wage substantially higher than the state’s minimum wage. The Baltimore ordinance drew little attention, but Janis and Goldberg noticed it and began discussing how to bring a version to Los Angeles. Most of the city contract workers lacked the health-insurance benefits that city employees enjoyed. Janis and Goldberg decided an L.A. ordinance should not only give contract workers a living wage but also require employers to provide them with health insurance or pay them more so they could purchase it on their own.

For the next two years, the TIDC— which by then had changed its name to the Living Wage Coalition—battled Riordan for the public’s and the council’s support. It commissioned studies, which concluded that the wage would neither damage the contractors nor put the city at any financial risk.

It embarked on a campaign in every council member’s district. “It held countless meetings in churches and synagogues all across town,” Goldberg says.

The campaign began with the support of council members from black and Latino communities and the liberal, largely Jewish Westside. On the 15-member council, however, it took 10 votes to override a mayoral veto, which required winning over members from more conservative districts in the San Fernando Valley. Laura Chick, from the affluent western part of the Valley, was on the fence.

“Then clergy from every denomination began faxing in their support to their council members every day,” Durazo says. “People expected that from Watts but not from the West Valley. Laura told us, ‘Oh, my God, you’ve got the Valley rabbis.’” When the ordinance came before the council at a tumultuous session in 1997, Chick supported it, as did 11 of her colleagues. The remaining three members having abstained, the ordinance passed without opposition; the mayor’s veto was overridden shortly thereafter.

The living-wage campaign established LAANE’s “inside outside” strategy. On the inside, Janis met nearly every day with Goldberg and her staff, tweaking the ordinance

What Madeline Janis realized was that local government’s assistance to private companies gave cities and counties the legal authority to raise wages and create private-sector benefits. tially called the Tourism Industry Development Council (TIDC) and funded entirely by Local 11, the group set out to expose the widespread poverty among nonunion hotel workers. Janis served as its executive director and, for a time, its sole staffer; Durazo was chair of the board. The group’s first major battle was defensive. In 1995, at the behest of Mayor Richard Riordan, the city’s airport commission awarded new franchises to restaurants and stores at LAX that sought to discharge their unionized employees and hire new workers at lower wages.

Remembering what she had learned at Latham & Watkins, Janis brought the fired workers to city hall. “Suddenly, 200 people were coming into chambers, telling us they were losing their jobs,” says Jackie Goldberg, then a city council member, who would become a key ally of LAANE’s. Janis persuaded the council to pass an ordinance forbidding the new franchises from firing the workers already there. Riordan vetoed the bill, but the council overrode him.

Even before it was done, the airport battle spawned a new campaign. “When we held the hearings,” Durazo says, “we found that the new hires at LAX didn’t have union

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language to eliminate the objections of swing council members. On the outside, the Living Wage Coalition brought poverty-wage city contract workers before the council and groups throughout the city. A separate clergy-support organization, Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE), grew out of the campaign and has become a potent ally in LAANE’s endeavors. Along with prominent religious leaders like the Reverend James Lawson and Rabbi Leonard Beerman, Janis conceived the organization as an ongoing moral voice for economic equity. “No one had created a citywide coalition of clergy for social justice before,” Durazo says.

The living-wage campaign was the first in which Janis argued that a local government could mandate higher wages and health insurance for workers. By law and tradition, federal and state governments had set minimum wages and claimed the power to extend health coverage.

What Janis realized was that local government’s contracts with and assistance to private companies gave cities and

LAANE has cracked the code for the economy’s seemingly most intractable conundrum: how to raise the incomes of America’s workers. counties the legal authority to raise wages and create benefits selectively in the private sector. Indeed, as major cities tend to be more liberal than the states and the nation as a whole, the odds of winning such gains at the local level were higher than they were in state legislatures and in Congress. The spread of living-wage ordinances to more than 100 other cities in the wake of the Los Angeles victory confirmed Janis’s insight. She had, in essence, created a new strategy, in a new arena, for American liberalism.

LAANE’s success in the living-wage campaign, and its continued successes, also reflected a shift in power in Los Angeles from business to labor. It was a remarkable development in a city where labor had never been a major force.

For most of the 20th century, business had dominated politics in Los Angeles—indeed, throughout the first half of the century, the Los Angeles Times and the city’s business associations touted L.A. as the nonunion alternative to San Francisco. After World War II, the Committee of 25, a group of corporate grandees, controlled city government; with few exceptions, mayors and council members did their bidding. By the 1990s, however, most of L.A.’s largest

36 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JUL /AUG 2013

companies—aerospace titans like McDonnell Douglas, oil firms like ARCO, all of the city’s major banks, all but one of its movie and television studios—had merged into national or international corporations headquartered elsewhere.

Developers retained their clout, but what remained of the city’s business elite, to Riordan’s frustration, wasn’t the all-powerful force it had been in earlier decades.

Nobody took more advantage of this vacuum than Contreras and the L.A. County Federation of Labor. In 1994, California voters had passed the Republican-sponsored Proposition 187, which denied virtually all governmental services, including the right to attend public school, to undocumented immigrants. Although courts struck down the measure soon after it passed, the initiative galvanized the state’s, and more particularly the city’s, Latino population, whose rates of electoral participation had always been low. Contreras saw and seized the opportunity to build a labor-Latino electoral alliance, much as the clothing and garment unions of New York City had activated the immigrant communities of the Lower East Side in the early 20th century.

The federation began routinely turning out thousands of union activists at election time, drawn disproportionately from such immigrant-heavy locals as the hotel workers and the janitors, to walk precincts in Latino and African American neighborhoods. It developed and backed candidates in those neighborhoods who had a strong commitment to causes like a living wage. By 2000, the labor-Latino alliance was the most potent electoral force in more than half the city’s council districts and had enough strength to help Democrats win long-standing Republican legislative and congressional districts on the fringes of L.A. County as well.

Beyond building a powerful political army, Contreras, Durazo, and Janis also transformed the image of labor in Los Angeles. In most American cities, as private-sector unions continued to shrink, the face of labor became that of taxpayer-supported public-employee unions. In L.A., by contrast, labor was increasingly identified with the city’s largely Latino working class—an identification bolstered by the marches of striking janitors and hotel workers down the city’s boulevards and by the huge immigration-reform rallies that the unions coordinated. In other cities, uppermiddle-class liberals often disdain labor as a Neanderthal, a defender of overpaid assembly-line workers and bureaucrats. In Los Angeles, labor is the tribune of a largely young, rising, and visibly hard-working immigrant community, which has won it a more favorable reputation among the same Democratic groups who elsewhere have dismissed it as yesterday’s news.

W

ith the passage of the living-wage ordinance, foundations took notice of the coalition’s success, and with a bigger budget, the organization began to grow beyond its initial half-dozen employees. The ordinance, though, only affected roughly 20,000 workers when first enacted. For Janis, the question became how to win wage increases for other categories of workers. She arrived at a new name for the group—the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy— and a new strategy: the community benefits agreement.

As the living wage was moving toward enactment in 1997, one of the country’s biggest developers, TrizecHahn, was seeking city approval for a project in the middle of Goldberg’s council district. The Hollywood-Highland project, as it came to be known, would house retail outlets and the theater that would become home to the Academy Awards.

It would also upgrade a Holiday Inn into a Renaissance Hotel. The city’s Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) had agreed to give the development roughly $100 million in property-tax abatements, but—in a particular wrinkle of L.A. city government—the project could not proceed without the approval of the council member in whose district it was located. Janis and Goldberg realized that since the city was providing the project with financial assistance, it could insist that the developer meet many of the same criteria that had gone into the living-wage ordinance.

Janis recalls thinking about “all the ways that a major development project can benefit a local community— through jobs, through affordable housing, through parks and open space and other environmental benefits.” She and Goldberg developed a plan that hinged Goldberg’s approval on TrizecHahn’s guaranteeing local hiring and living wages for the hotel, theater, and store employees.

Goldberg’s staff convened meetings of Hollywood residents and businesses to mobilize support for the deal, while LAANE coordinated the activities of four unions whose members stood to benefit from the agreement. In the end, LAANE didn’t get everything it wanted, but it got a lot.

Sixty-five percent of the workers at the completed project lived in Hollywood. The hotel and theater workers and the project’s parking-lot attendants and janitors all received living wages, though the employees of the retail outlets did not. The hotel workers, janitors, and car parkers won union representation.

The Hollywood-Highland campaign inaugurated LAANE’s second phase. For the next seven years, the group would use the leverage of government assistance to win hiring, wage, and environmental benefits for the communities in which the developments were situated. The most prominent project on which LAANE negotiated a community

benefits agreement was Staples Center, built on land adjacent to the city’s downtown convention center. While Staples was still on the drawing boards, LAANE helped build a community organization in the impoverished neighborhood nearby. “They were able to lift up that community’s voice in a way that was effective but not adversarial,” says the Surdna Foundation’s Escoffery. “Their participation in Staples is now looked at as a model approach to securing better outcomes for projects that get large public subsidies.”

Rather than proceed project by project, Janis soon wanted to take the idea of community benefit agreements citywide, and the place to make that happen was the city’s redevelopment agency. In 2002, Mayor James Hahn, fighting a ballot measure that would have permitted the San Fernando Valley to secede from the city, turned to the labor movement for the foot soldiers and funding he needed to defeat the measure. Contreras had one condition for granting Hahn’s request: that the mayor appoint Janis to the CRA board.

Janis’s goal as a board member was to require every project that received at least $1 million in CRA assistance to enter into a community benefit agreement. Within a year, the CRA adopted her proposal. Janis was never a favorite of the city’s business organizations, and it was during her tenure at the agency that she became their bête noire. According to Ruben Gonzalez, vice president of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, Janis’s sole objective is “to find a better way to get union jobs—period. The more regulations and prescriptions we put on businesses, it makes L.A. a less and less appealing place to do business, and LAANE has been at the forefront of creating those regulations.”

A more nuanced view of Janis comes from businessman David Abel, who publishes an influential newsletter that covers the L.A. economy. He believes that Janis has championed the poor but slighted the city’s struggling middle class. “If you wanted an intelligent advocate for the bottom 20 percent of the job force, she’d probably be at the top of the list,” Abel says. “If you go up the scale to 40 percent, she may not be that advocate.”

Some of Janis’s sharpest critics have been among the region’s most powerful black elected officials. City Councilman Bernard Parks tried repeatedly to get Janis removed from the CRA board. He argues that the imposition of wage and benefit standards or card-check unionization on businesses can lead some to scrap their development plans. This argument was voiced vehemently in 2004, when LAANE fought to keep Wal-Mart from opening a store in the preponderantly black and Latino city of Inglewood, adjacent to South Central Los Angeles.

Fearing that Wal-Mart’s low wages would depress the pay

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 37

of the region’s 70,000 unionized grocery workers, the L.A. County Federation of Labor had persuaded local governments to keep the company out of the region— until the Inglewood City Council gave the chain entry.

LAANE authored and campaigned for an initiative to reverse the council’s decision; it prevailed with just over 60 percent of the vote.

IN THE WAKE OF THE NEW CRA policy, LAANE entered its

third and current phase, moving beyond community benefits to concentrate on specific industries. “The left tends to focus on the economy from 60,000 feet high,” Janis says.

“It leaves progressives with no sense of what they can do to change it. If you focus on hotels or manufacturing or retail, you can figure out an agenda.” By organizing around particular development projects, LAANE had raised wages for many workers but had not enabled many of them to join

38 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JUL /AUG 2013

gregg segal

Roxana Tynan joined LAANE’s staff in 2001 and became its executive director last year.

a union and enjoy the security and benefits that membership brings. “We wanted to link our policy work to the industries that unions could organize and that are the core of the L.A. economy,” says Roxana Tynan, at the time LAANE’s deputy director.

The campaigns that LAANE has led during the past six years—which include a groundbreaking effort to provide more than 20,000 African Americans with jobs constructing the city’s massive rail project—have a scale and complexity far beyond the alliance’s earlier endeavors. As recently as 2003, LAANE had a staff of 12. Today, it employs 45 organizers, researchers, strategists, publicists, and fundraisers on eight separate campaigns and has an annual budget of $4.6 million. Following a model pioneered by UNITE HERE , LAANE has hired a largely young and racially diverse cohort of economic researchers to master the complexities of the industries it has sought to transform. A disproportionate share are graduates of UCLA’s urban-planning department, where many of the faculty specialize in the L.A. economy and labor force.

Unusual among progressive organizations, LAANE has paid particular attention to the development of its staff. “The organizing theorist Marshall Ganz has said the three key components of a progressive victory are story, structure, and strategy,” Janis says. “I think progressive groups don’t consider structure nearly enough. Occupy Wall Street had a great story but no structure.” For the past six years, LAANE has employed a leadership-development specialist, Nancy Smyth, who has helped turn organizers and researchers into directors of LAANE’s campaigns. “Madeline and Roxana saw LAANE was growing really fast,” Smyth says.

“It had a bunch of talented activists, but many lacked the skills to manage campaigns or staff.” Training included everything from speaking before governmental bodies to forging effective alliances among groups that viewed each other as enemies.

In early 2012, after 19 years on the job, Janis stepped down as executive director and was succeeded by Tynan.

Forty-five years old, Tynan has spent her life in diverse precincts of the left. “I grew up with champagne socialists for parents, in England and L.A.,” she says. “I took their politics more seriously than they did. I have an early memory of reading about Chile after the coup, reading

about students being tortured. I must have been about six.”

Tynan’s father was Kenneth Tynan, the noted New Yorker critic and author of Oh, Calcutta, the Broadway succès de scandale. She attended Yale, where she joined a long line of students so impressed by the campus’s UNITE HERE locals that she went to work for the union upon graduation. Tynan was part of the campaign that organized nearly every hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. In her mid-twenties, she moved back to Los Angeles as an economic-development aide in Jackie Goldberg’s office, where she worked closely with Janis. When Goldberg was termed out in 2001, Tynan moved to LAANE , where she headed up the communitybenefit campaigns before becoming deputy director.

It was under Tynan’s leadership that LAANE waged its campaign to raise hotel workers’ wages in Long Beach.

She has also played a central role in LAANE’s efforts to cement a strong labor and environmental alliance. Many observers consider her almost as accomplished a strategist as Janis but with a lighter touch. “Madeline alienated some people, especially when she was on the CRA board,” one city official says. “Roxana’s not so in-your-face.”

LAANE’S MOST IMPROBABLY victorious

the facilitator of the coalition,” says Adrian Martinez, a staff attorney at the Defense Council. “They were the glue that held the blues and the greens together.” The coalition authored a plan to address both air quality and the drivers’ low incomes. Only half the plan succeeded. The harbor commissions mandated stricter pollution controls on trucks, but courts struck down the rules setting higher wage standards for drivers.

Nonetheless, the ports campaign convinced Herrera that organizing trash collectors could be part of a broader effort that could yield environmental gains. At the helm of a coalition of 40 groups, LAANE proposed to divide the city into 11 zones and let companies bid for an exclusive 10-year franchise within each zone. The franchises would be required to maintain rigorous truck and recycling standards, worker health and safety standards, and the payment of living wages to the drivers. Whether drivers will join the Teamsters is uncertain, but the rationalization of the industry makes the possibility more likely.

The spread of living-wage ordinances to more than 100 other cities has confirmed Janis’s belief that getting public benefits from public investments is a powerful idea.

campaign is its most recent: restructuring the city’s waste-disposal industry. In Los Angeles, unionized city employees, in trucks powered by natural gas, pick up the trash of homeowners, much of which is recycled. But a multiplicity of private companies pick up the trash for businesses and apartment buildings, employing low-wage workers in trucks, 75 percent of which are diesel-powered, with a lower share of their trash destined for recycling. “It’s the Wild West out there,” says LAANE’s Greg Good, who continues to direct the campaign. “You buy a truck that’s 7 days old or 70 years old, fill out an application, pledge 10 percent of your proceeds to the city’s recycling fund, and you’re in business. There are zero recycling standards.”

For years, Ron Herrera, the leader of Teamsters Local 396, had wanted to organize the city’s private trash-­ collection drivers, though with roughly 125 companies in the market, it was a daunting prospect. A recent LAANE campaign to raise the wages of the truckers who hauled cargo to and from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and to reduce the air pollution in adjacent neighborhoods showed Herrera that the Teamsters didn’t have to take on this fight by themselves. In the ports campaign, the Teamsters worked with Change to Win, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, neighborhood groups, and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s office. “ LAANE was

Similar systems are in place in other cities, but proposing to dismantle an already-existing industry was something that no major metropolis had ever done, and for good reason. It upset existing business arrangements of powerful companies. “We touched 15 sacred cows, and every one kicked,” Good says. “The Chamber of Commerce, the landlords, the studios, the hospitals, the hotels, the groceries, the realtors—all their associations fought us.”

But LAANE documented the improvements that cleaner trucks and more recycling would make to the environment. As in the Long Beach hotel campaign, the group enlisted the support of small businesses, which tend to be charged higher trash-collection rates than larger establishments that could cut separate deals with the waste companies. Last November, the city council voted to set in motion LAANE’s proposal.

The key to the waste campaign’s success was that it was as enviro-green as it was union-blue. The coalition’s position paper, for instance, contained an introduction by the Sierra Club’s national president. For the Teamsters, this was a new approach to organizing. “We now know that we

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 39

can’t do it alone,” Herrera says. One sign of the Teamsters’ commitment to its environmental partners is the decision

by James P. Hoffa, president of the international, to reverse the union’s support for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. If the Sierra Club can help the Teamsters organize truckers, the Teamsters can help the Sierra Club preserve the Alaskan wilderness.

AT THE CORE OF LAANE’S STRATEGIC vision is the con-

viction that cities—not states or the national government— are the arenas where progressive initiatives have the best prospects for enduring success. This is partly because the forces for liberal change—immigrants, young people, African Americans, environmentalists—are clustered in cities, but there’s more to LAANE’s calculus than that. The group believes that campaigns take time—time to educate residents, time to find leaders in a neighborhood, time to mold coalitions that meet the needs of their varied participants.

These are tasks best done locally. In part, this proclivity for “deep organizing” and “deep coalitions”—“deep” is an inescapable word when talking with a LAANE-ite—also reflects the organizing style of UNITE HERE , for which unionizing a hotel is a painstaking process of building workers’ confidence and capacities.

“I have caution about getting ahead of ourselves, tempting though it may be,” Tynan says. “Without deep power and real results at the municipal level, you won’t be able to move serious legislation at the state level. I want us to hit a tipping point in Los Angeles, where our policies have impacted more people, where we have more electoral strength, before we move more to the statewide level.”

Some local problems, however, can’t be solved locally, which is how Janis has come to take on her new position as LAANE’s national policy director. When she stepped down from LAANE ’s top job, she anticipated devoting herself to bringing well-paying manufacturing jobs back to Los Angeles. In 2008, L.A. County voters had passed a ballot measure that raised sales taxes to fund, in conjunction with the federal Department of Transportation, a massive commuter-rail construction project. Janis saw an opportunity to use the transit agency’s purchasing of railcars and buses to boost local industry.

She discovered, however, that federal law prohibited the use of Department of Transportation funds for any rail or bus purchases by agencies committed to local hiring. She spent most of 2012 working with department officials to develop language in the transit-agency proposal that would permit inner-city hiring yet not run afoul of federal regulations. Janis has now embarked on a campaign with the AFL-CIO to show unions, community

organizations, and environmental groups across the nation how they can lobby their transit agencies to put criteria similar to L.A.’s in their own purchase orders.

With Chicago soon to spend $2 billion on new railcars and other cities planning similar purchases, Janis hopes that this new emphasis on targeted hiring can help revive a sector of American manufacturing.

LAANE began by helping employees of companies doing city work, then employees of companies that benefited from redevelopment or other public investment, then the urban poor whom the government required public-works contractors to hire, and now, manufacturing workers who will owe their jobs to policies that will help create factories in their own backyard. If LAANE was initially the tribune for the bottom 20 percent of the workforce, it is now becoming the advocate of the bottom 50 percent. No matter the intended beneficiary, LAANE has prevailed with the same underlying argument: that the investment of public funds should yield public benefits.

If LAANE was initially the tribune for the bottom 20 percent of the workforce, it is now becoming the advocate for the bottom 50 percent.

It’s a powerful idea, and one, LAANE believes, that can travel. It has spawned similar organizations in 15 other municipalities, including Oakland, San Diego, Denver, Atlanta, and New York.

How replicable is the LAANE model? To be sure, Los Angeles has been exceptionally propitious terrain. The radical demographic transformation of the city over the past quarter-century created a political base for progressive change. But then, most major American cities have undergone demographic changes similar to, if not on the scale of, L.A.’s, and those transformations continue.

What sets Los Angeles apart is its labor movement, which has been willing to invest in and nurture a group like LAANE and been willing to engage in deep political organizing of its own.

The Los Angeles labor movement that did all this, however, is a recent creation. “People forget that in the late ’80s, we were nowhere,” Tynan says. “We had weak and antiquated unions. We had no progressive infrastructure.

People now dismiss what we’ve done since then by saying L.A. is different, but L.A. wasn’t different 25 years ago.” 

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 41

The Withered Writ

Habeas corpus, the age-old means for prisoners to challenge their detention, has never been more restricted than it is now.

BY LINC O LN C AP LAN ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY CAMPBELL

he writ of habeas corpus, until not long ago, was a mysterious yet potent safeguard of liberty in American law. It worked like an incantation to break an evil spell. A prisoner petitions a court for a writ. “Habeas corpus” means “May you produce the body,” spoken from the point of view of a judge. He orders whoever is depriving the prisoner of his freedom to bring him to court—a warden confining a prisoner, the secretary of defense holding a detainee, or a magistrate who has denied bail to someone jailed but not convicted—and to justify the detention. The judge then decides whether the petitioner is being detained in breach of the Constitution or some other law.

In 1963, Justice William Brennan Jr. wrote that “government must always be accountable to the judiciary for a man’s imprisonment.” The prisoner is “entitled to his immediate release,” the justice emphasized, if the government violates the law in putting him behind bars.

Brennan was one of the most influential jus-

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tices of the 20th century. A champion of the individual versus the government—in what he called “the unceasing contest between personal liberty and government oppression”—he led the Supreme Court to strengthen American democracy by strengthening various roles of citizens, to minimize those clashes. That included bolstering the First Amendment so people could be confident about criticizing officials without getting sued, adopting the principle of “one person, one vote” so each vote would have equal weight, and enhancing the power of federal courts and citizens’ access to them to protect these and many other rights.

He embraced habeas corpus as part of that enhancement—as a crucial tool for the protection of constitutional rights. Following his lead, the Warren Court expanded habeas law to redress appalling treatment by many states of criminal defendants, especially minorities and the poor, who had often experienced unfair arrests, been coerced into confessions, and received unjust trials.

Habeas became, above all, a tool for challenging death sentences. Robust habeas law protects death-row inmates from a kind of vigilantism carried out in state courts—particularly inmates whose crimes were experienced as an outrage not just against the victim but also against the community. The idea was to give the petitioner access to the safe harbor of a federal court.

By expanding habeas law, the Supreme Court empowered the hundreds of federal trial courts to play an essential part in making sure state and local governments were complying with the Constitution. Since the Judiciary Act of 1867 made habeas corpus available in federal court to state prisoners who claimed their rights had been violated, the writ has been pushed and pulled in the persistent American debate about the balance of power between the national government and the states.

In Brennan’s view, the federal courts had the ultimate responsibility to defend the Constitution. No state’s denial to an individual

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 43

of constitutional rights could become final without that review—especially state criminal decisions that deprived someone of his liberty and possibly his life. No statute of limitations cuts off an individual’s access to a habeas writ because, the Supreme Court said, there is no higher duty than to maintain the writ unimpaired. For that reason, a petitioner’s failure to persuade a federal trial court to grant a writ did not keep him from applying for one again.

The Constitution explicitly limits the power of Congress to suspend the right to habeas. In doing so, Brennan believed, the Constitution underscores the importance of the writ and its role as a check on government. He declared that “the Constitution invites, if it does not compel, a generous construction of the power of the federal courts” to grant what he, like others going back to this country’s founding, reverentially called the Great Writ.

T

oday, federal law governing habeas corpus makes Brennan’s view seem antique. The writ has withered and is in a shabby state. The Supreme Court occasionally lets petitions for writs go forward in federal courts, as it did this past term in a pair of 5-4 rulings. But far more often, the Court thwarts such intrusion, impatiently overturning federal appeals courts that have granted a state prisoner relief based on a habeas petition. These reversals matter because they almost always involve life-and-death stakes: The habeas story is about capital punishment.

More to the point, it is about the radical cutback in habeas law as a reliable means of challenging unconstitutional death sentences.

Many reversals involve no dispute between the conservatives who control the Roberts Court with five seats and the four moderate liberals. The decisions are often per curiam— by the court—which is to say, collectively and unanimously. Per curiam opinions are supposed to be for uncontroversial rulings, but that is not how the current Court regularly uses them.

Last year, for example, with a per curiam opinion, the Court made a typical reversal of a grant of a habeas writ, this one by the Sixth Circuit, which encompasses Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The appeals court’s majority opinion described “flagrant prosecutorial misconduct” at the trial of the petitioner,

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concluding that the prosecutor’s comments “so infected the trial with unfairness as to make the conviction a denial of due process.” The Court rebuffed that and other well-delineated reasons for granting habeas as “the flimsiest of rationales.”

The main advocate for habeas retrenchment after the heyday of the Warren Court was Justice William Rehnquist, who ardently believed that states should be free to run their systems of criminal justice without federal interference, and the best way to avoid that was by drastically constraining the federal habeas writ.

After Rehnquist became chief justice in 1986, the Supreme Court moved to the right about habeas by narrowing the grounds on which the writ could be used. The restrictions were procedural but had serious substantive consequences. They blocked federal habeas claims, for example, when a state court denied them on non-federal grounds, even if the petitioner’s constitutional rights might well have been violated.

As part of his campaign to restrict habeas, Rehnquist in 1988 persuaded the American Bar Association (ABA) to recommend steps for reform. A commission of ten experts with divergent outlooks—from a law-and-order state chief justice and a pro-death-penalty state deputy attorney general, to a leading anti-death-penalty trio including a lawyer, a scholar, and a state court justice—made a comprehensive review of habeas.

Everyone on the commission agreed that reform was vital. But the members disagreed about whether they needed to concentrate on speeding up the habeas process or making it fairer. In 1986 and 1987, when a total of 43 death-row inmates were executed, the average delay between conviction and execution was about seven years. Habeas critics blamed the delay on frivolous appeals and the inexplicably long time it took to complete each step of a capital case, from trial through final appeal. Habeas defenders attributed the delay to a process that was admittedly arcane yet should not be rushed since a life hung in the balance, and to the time it took to discover the many ways an inmate was squashed by American criminal justice.

A book-length report laid out the evidence the commission had gathered and concluded that one would be “grossly naïve to think that

delay arises simply from repetitious filings in federal court at the eleventh hour by unethical lawyers who hope to get stays of execution from anti-death-penalty judges using their discretion as a subterfuge.” Delays were caused by a host of reasons: from incompetent counsel; from reviewing the elaborate record in a capital case; from drawn-out state court contemplation about the meaning of cruel and unusual punishment; from uncertainty about when it was OK to petition for federal habeas review; from the time it took to investigate new facts; from assessing how new developments in the law affected a case; and, finally, “from the understandable inclination of both litigants and their attorneys to postpone the ultimate sanction”—executing an inmate. The commission also reported that “many state supreme court judges and justices either feel no resentment when federal courts address the merits of state death-row inmates’ claims or actually invite federal consideration.”

The commission made 16 recommendations for habeas reform. Six were about providing competent counsel at every stage of challenging a capital conviction and death sentence.

(A former Supreme Court law clerk told the commission what he had learned during that experience: “The death penalty frequently results from nothing more than poverty and poor lawyering.”) Other recommendations were intended to speed up the habeas process by adding time constraints, limiting challenges following an appeal of the conviction and sentencing, and narrowing the scope of habeas in most instances to claims that the petitioner was innocent rather than that he suffered a violation of his constitutional rights.

The ABA’s endorsement of the recommendations suggested that the commission had forged a solid consensus, with compromises on both sides. When the House and Senate got around to passing a new statute to address imperfections of habeas law, it was hoped they could adopt the ABA model already accepted by conservatives and liberals.

T

he dark age of federal habeas law began in 1996, with the passage of a federal statute called the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA).

In the words of the leading treatise about habeas law, this was the moment “Congress dropped

the atomic bomb of AEDPA on the federal judiciary, shattering the preexisting structure of habeas corpus law.” The statute seemed to take the association’s recommendations and twist them into more restrictive versions.

The basics of the new habeas provisions were part of Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Republican “Contract with America.” They went from being right-wing pipe dreams to stringent lawand-order options in 1995, after the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City killed 168 people, including 19 children in a day-care center.

Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah, took the position that federal habeas proceedings gave convicted criminals the chance “to relitigate claims already considered and rejected by State courts.” Habeas law, he argued, allowed a single federal trial judge to undo three levels of time-consuming state court work: the trial, a regular appeal, and a post-conviction review. In death-penalty cases, he insisted, delays due to habeas had “seriously eroded the public’s confidence in our criminal justice system.”

A bipartisan Emergency Committee to Save Habeas Corpus, led by former Democratic and Republican attorneys general from the Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations, presented a different view. Nicholas Katzenbach, a former Johnson attorney general, testified before the Senate that “undoubtedly the writ does raise problems of federalism.” The habeas process should and could be streamlined, the committee argued, but Congress would create a greater problem by compromising the Bill of Rights, as the legislation would clearly do.

Republicans in Congress attached the habeas provisions to an anti-terrorism bill of the Clinton administration. Bill Clinton, running to the right for re-election as president, beat back opposition to the bill in both houses of Congress, insisting that it be passed. A year and a week after the bombing, it was. That was the year that annual death sentences in the United States peaked at 315.

For the first time, the law imposed a statute of limitations on habeas petitions, with a complexity that ensured most defendants would not be able to comply with the limit; most defendants do not have a lawyer, since the right to counsel generally does not apply

in habeas cases. The law also made it nearly impossible to qualify for filing a second or subsequent petition for a writ.

Most significantly, it adopted a novel concept that the emergency committee considered unconstitutional. It said that a federal court cannot grant a writ of habeas corpus to an inmate in state prison solely because a state court misapplied the Constitution. Instead, the inmate must prove that the state court’s decision was “contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States” by the time the inmate was convicted and sentenced. In other words, even if a

IN JUSTICE BRENNAN’S VIEW, THE FEDERAL COURTS HAD THE ULTIMATE RESPONSIBILITY TO DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION.

federal court is certain a state court decision is wrong and there are excellent reasons that view is correct, that does not make it “unreasonable.” This draconian provision attacked the writ at its core as a check on government.

I

n 2000, James Liebman of Columbia Law School and colleagues published “A Broken System,” a groundbreaking study of every American capital appeal in the 23 years before AEDPA was passed. It found precisely the opposite of what Congress said was needed.

In that span, 34 states imposed 5,760 death sentences and executed 313 inmates. Liebman and his colleagues learned that, in almost seven out of every ten cases, a reviewing court decided that the trial court had made a seri-

ous, reversible error. State courts found errors in almost half the capital cases. Federal courts found serious errors in 40 percent or more of the cases they reviewed—after state courts had upheld those convictions and death sentences.

To the authors, the study affirmed the view that many capital appeals took too long, not for the reasons AEDPA supporters claimed but “because American capital sentences are so persistently and systematically fraught with error that seriously undermines their reliability.”

There were two persistent reasons for errors: “(1) egregiously incompetent defense lawyers who didn’t even look for—and demonstrably missed—important evidence that the defendant was innocent or did not deserve to die; and (2) police or prosecutors who did discover that kind of evidence but suppressed it, again keeping it from the jury.” The study proved that many on death row should not be there and that their principal avenue for relief—filing a writ of habeas corpus—had been closed off.

“A Broken System” helps explain why the American Law Institute, the country’s most prestigious nonpartisan group of scholars, judges, and lawyers, voted “overwhelmingly” (its word) in 2009 to support a resolution against the death penalty. The institute reported on the “major reasons why many thoughtful and knowledgeable individuals doubt whether the capital-punishment regimes in place in three-fourths of the states, or in any form likely to be implemented in the near future, meet or are likely ever to meet basic concerns of fairness in process and outcome.”

One reason is the huge costs of trials for people charged with capital crimes, of the intricate appeals process, of keeping prisoners on death row, and of maintaining a corrections unit that meets constitutional standards for carrying out executions. Another reason is the near impossibility of expunging racial bias from a criminal-justice system that disproportionately imposes death sentences on blacks who kill whites. Still another is the long-unmet challenge of providing capital defendants with lawyers who have the skill, experience, and expertise to represent them ably.

The institute’s concerns didn’t end there. In the 32 states that now have the death penalty, 28 have elected judges who are more likely to feel pressed by politics to stand up for the death

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 45

penalty. There is also the likelihood that, after some people have been executed, evidence will then surface proving they were innocent: Eighteen people who served time on death row for an average of 11 years have been exonerated since 1993 with DNA evidence.

Six states in the past six years have abolished the death penalty, bringing the total to 18 that do not allow capital punishment. There is a de facto moratorium in a dozen more states that still have the death penalty: None of these has executed anyone for at least seven years. That makes 30 states that have abolished capital punishment or have long paused from carrying out executions. This death-penalty-free zone is even larger, since prosecutors pursue most death-penalty cases in counties where just one-eighth of the American population lives.

I

n the meantime, AEDPA operates in its alternate universe. This summer, Warren Lee Hill, with an IQ of around 70, waited for the Supreme Court to decide to hear his lawyers’ challenge to his death sentence. While serving a life term in a Georgia prison for murdering his girlfriend, he killed another inmate.

A Georgia state court sentenced him to death in 1993. Under a 2002 Supreme Court ruling, it is unconstitutional to execute someone who is intellectually disabled (some courts still use the term “mentally retarded”).

Hill’s state case was a close one because he was considered mildly disabled. This year, at 52, he functioned at the level of a sixth-grader.

Alone among the states, Georgia requires proof of this disability beyond a reasonable doubt.

Seven experts were divided about whether Hill met that severe standard: Four experts for the defense concluded he did; three for the prosecution said he did not. A state trial judge said that, if the Georgia standard of proof were the same as in most states—where a claim of being intellectually disabled would have to be shown to be more likely than not—he would have found Hill disabled and exempt from execution. But under Georgia’s more demanding standard, the judge upheld the death sentence.

State and federal appeals courts have upheld that sentence again and again.

In February, Hill was within half an hour of being put to death by lethal injection when the federal United States Court of Appeals for

46 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JUL /AUG 2013

the 11th Circuit, which encompasses Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, was persuaded to stay the execution. In response to publicity about the case, the three state experts changed their mind and explained why in sworn affidavits.

As a result, all of the experts who examined him were of the unanimous opinion that he was disabled—beyond a reasonable doubt.

In a brief to the federal appeals court, lawyers for Hill wrote that the new evidence proving his disability “was previously unavailable” and that, under these facts, “no reasonable fact finder” would have found Hill “eligible for the death penalty.” His lawyers sought life without parole

JUSTICE REHNQUIST BELIEVED THAT STATES SHOULD BE FREE TO RUN THEIR CRIMINALJUSTICE SYSTEMS WITHOUT FEDERAL INTERFERENCE. for their client. In April, a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit ruled 2-1 against him and vacated the stay on his execution. In the view of Judge Frank M. Hull for the court’s two-judge majority, while Hill presented new evidence, it was in support of the same claim he had made in a previous habeas petition—that his intellectual disability made him ineligible for the death penalty. The court had to reject that old claim under AEDPA , Judge Hull wrote, because the statute “greatly restricts the power of federal courts to award relief to state prisoners” in order “to advance the principles of comity, finality, and federalism.” The court could consider only a new claim asserting Hill’s innocence, the majority said. Since he accepted his own guilt, what business did he have in federal court?

It is a measure of how draconian AEDPA is, and the Court’s application of it, that the country’s leading habeas scholars felt compelled to file a brief with a stern message for the justices: If you don’t grant relief, it will mean that AEDPA has eliminated the power of the federal courts to grant relief as a last resort even in a “rare and extraordinary” case like Hill’s that presents “a patently meritorious, life-or-death constitutional claim.” The state of Georgia scheduled Hill’s execution for July, unless the Court stayed his execution again.

In dissent, Judge Rosemary Barkett wrote, “The perverse consequence of such an application of AEDPA is that a federal court must acquiesce to, even condone, a state’s insistence on carrying out the unconstitutional execution of a mentally retarded person.” She went on, “The idea that courts are not permitted to acknowledge that a mistake has been made which would bar an execution is quite incredible for a country that not only prides itself on having the quintessential system of justice but attempts to export it to the world as a model of fairness.”

Since AEDPA became law, most of the federal courts that have interpreted the statute have said it obliged them to defer to state court rulings. The statute has largely kept federal courts from reaching the merits in countless cases where lawyers made compelling arguments that the prisoner deserved to win under the Constitution; the statute has largely eliminated the federal writ of habeas corpus for state prisoners. In too many AEDPA cases, federal courts have allowed inmates on death row to be executed in models of unfairness.

There now exists an illogical chasm between law and justice—between, on the one hand, the statute’s reflexive antagonism to challenges to the death penalty and, on the other hand, much of the country’s reckoning with the failure of states to administer capital punishment constitutionally.

AEDPA and the Supreme Court all but hide this chasm—and the injustice it regularly leads to—behind byzantine rules and rulings, making it exceedingly hard for our legal system to keep the Constitution’s promise that habeas will be available to prevent the most serious deprivations of liberty. Rather than a grand means to break an evil spell, AEDPA is the opposite. 

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Los Infiltradores How three young undocumented activists risked deportation to expose the injustices of immigrant detention—and invented a new form of protest

BY M IC HAE L M AY PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEVE PAVEY

W

hen Marco Saavedra was arrested for the first time, during a September 2011 protest against U.S. immigration policy in Charlotte, North Carolina, he thought he was prepared. It was what he’d come to do. Still, he was taking a risk.

Saavedra is undocumented, and he was aware that the Charlotte police had an agreement with the federal government, under what’s known as the 287(g) program, that gave them the power to apprehend illegal immigrants and turn them over for deportation. Saavedra, who was then 21, had known dozens of undocumented activists who’d been arrested without being deported. But as he was sitting, handcuffed, in a gray-brick holding cell at the county jail, it was hard to suppress the fear.

He’d felt it most of his life, since his parents brought him from rural Mexico to New York City when he was three; growing up, he’d done all he could to make sure that even his closest friends didn’t know his status.

“The euphoria of the protest, the chanting in the street, was gone,” he says. “It was lonely and desolate. They took us out one by one to process us. And one of the others came back Marco Saavedra chants, “Undocumented! Unafraid!” as police arrest him outside the Broward Transitional Center in August 2012.

with paperwork indicating they planned to send him to an immigration detention center in Georgia. I panicked for a moment.”

A few hours later, an official came in to announce that none of the ten protesters was going to be sent to detention. He didn’t give a reason, although the activists knew from prior experience that immigration officials rarely deported young immigrant activists, probably because they don’t want the bad publicity.

But the moment of panic had jolted Saavedra, just like the terror he’d felt as a child when his father was pulled over by a cop. It put him back in touch with the threat of being pulled away from your life, suddenly, by immigration agents. Other people in the jail with him were in exactly that situation.

Saavedra is a “Dreamer,” part of the large movement of young undocumented activists demanding their rights. Over the next two nights, as he was held in a large pod in the jail, Saavedra began talking to the undocumented prisoners who were about to be transferred to the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia. He wondered if some of the lessons he’d learned from his organizing could be used to help them.

Another arrested protester, Mohammad Abdollahi, a brash organizer who’s always alert for an opportunity, had the same idea. Since 2009, Abdollahi had been leading campaigns to help get people out of detention. But in jail there was

one big problem: “I couldn’t speak Spanish,” says Abdollahi, who is Iranian. “But I had experience helping people get out of detention. So Marco translated my advice. We’d tell them not to sign the voluntary deportation papers, because then there’s a chance to fight their case.”

The activists’ time in jail was supposed to be the end of this particular action, but it turned out to be just the beginning. Saavedra, who lives in New York, and Abdollahi, a Michigander, had come to Charlotte at the urging of their mutual friend and fellow activist, Viridiana Martinez.

The three are leaders in a network of radical undocumented activists called the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, or NIYA. Martinez had also co-founded a local immigrant-rights group called the NC Dream Team, and she’d organized the rally a year ahead of the Democratic National Convention, which would come to Charlotte in 2012. They wanted to serve notice that young Latinos weren’t satisfied with President Barack Obama’s record on immigration and that they weren’t going to be quiet about it. The protest was staged at Central Piedmont Community College because it had a policy of giving citizens first priority in choosing classes, making it difficult for undocumented students to get a spot in the more popular courses.

By midday on September 6, a crowd of around 300 had gathered. About a dozen Dreamers took turns at the microphone,

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wearing bright red shirts that said, “The Dream is Coming.” They publicly “outed” themselves as undocumented and told their life stories.

Others spoke about the aggressive deportations under Obama’s watch—the administration has deported more undocumented immigrants than any administration before it—and decried the 287(g) program. Then they marched to a busy intersection near the campus, stood in the middle of the street, and chanted: “Undocumented! Unafraid!” Within minutes, traffic was backed up for blocks. It wasn’t long before the police vans arrived. As planned, seven activists—including Saavedra, Abdollahi, and Martinez—remained sitting in the road, volunteering to be arrested.

Most of the undocumented inmates Saavedra and Abdollahi talked to had been jailed for serious crimes, meaning they’d almost surely be deported. But then they met Javier de los Santos, who had been stopped for having a broken

ing cases,” and it’s the focus of their activism.

A few weeks later, when Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano held a town-hall meeting up the road at Duke University, Martinez and other activists were there to present her with an envelope containing the petition, which had more than 2,000 signatures. Napolitano spoke about the Obama administration’s policy of focusing on deporting criminals—rather than, say, people with minor traffic violations.

Javier de los Santos’s sister, Griselda, was there to challenge her. “My brother Javier has lived in North Carolina for a decade,” she told Napolitano through a translator. “My brother has done nothing wrong. He should be home with his wife and newborn child.” She pointed out that his deportation would violate the administration’s own policy. “How are you going to address the issue and how soon?” she asked.

Napolitano’s response was encouraging: “If the envelope contains information, let’s make

was unlikely, because they were Dreamers without serious criminal records. Even so, this would make the risk they’d taken in Charlotte look like nothing. But Saavedra, Abdollahi, and Martinez had been growing more fearless, and more radical, since they’d met.

BEFORE THEY STOOD UP and announced they

were undocumented, before they started putting themselves on the line and getting arrested, before they started making plans to infiltrate detention centers, Abdollahi, Saavedra, and Martinez were like hundreds of thousands of other Dreamers across America: scared of admitting to anyone they were undocumented.

But when they hit their late teens and early twenties, they’d begun to run up against the limits that their status placed on their future.

The only way to get their lives on track would be to fight to change immigration policy.

Mohammad Abdollahi, known as Mo, is a

The activists' time in jail was supposed to be the end of this particular action, but it turned out to be just the beginning. license-plate light. He had an infant son, a U.S. citizen. “He was soft-spoken and seemed worn down from work,” Saavedra says. “But he was honest, willing to talk, and open to the possibility of letting us fight his case.” He also had a DWI charge from years before, which made him a difficult—but not impossible—case.

In fact, de los Santos’s case was the beginning of a whole new style of activism—one that would, a year later, lead the three friends to pull off one of the boldest acts of civil disobedience yet in the fight for immigrant rights. After their release, NIYA went to work publicizing de los Santos’s plight. Martinez tapped into her North Carolina network and convinced the detainee’s family to work with the young activists. They started an online petition for his release. They raised money for a bond payment. They got a local attorney to take his case.

They convinced a reporter to write about de los Santos’s story in a local alternative weekly. It’s a powerful tactic. They call it “work-

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sure I get it.” One month later, de los Santos was released from detention on bond. Today, he remains in the country—now with a work permit and a driver’s license. He’s applying for a visa, and a judge is expected to decide whether he can permanently stay in the country next fall.

The success of the campaign made the three activists wonder: Could they replicate it on a grand scale by getting themselves detained on purpose? Inside immigration detention facilities, they would surely find dozens, if not hundreds, of low-priority detainees like de los Santos whom they could help. At the same time, they could publicize the fact that it wasn’t just criminals who were being deported, as the Obama administration kept insisting. “We realized we could be more effective if we just went straight to the source,” Abdollahi says.

Doing so would flip the script on immigration agents; the activists would be taking advantage of their undocumented status and thus could be detained and deported. Deportation

tall 27-year-old Iranian with thick eyebrows and a Beatles-mop hairdo. He speaks frenetically, as if he’s always running out of time.

His parents brought him to the country when he was three, and they settled in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His aha moment came after he applied to Eastern Michigan University and was accepted. “The counselor said, ‘You’re the perfect student we want for this university,’” he remembers. “They handed me an acceptance letter. I was super excited. And then, within like two minutes, they came back and said, ‘We missed this spot on your application where you wrote you weren’t a citizen.’ And they took the acceptance away. And that’s when I realized, I can’t stay silent.”

He has more to risk from deportation than most. He’s gay, and Iran has been known to throw gays in jail—it even has the death penalty for “repeated acts” of homosexuality. But Abdollahi seems to wear the risk as a badge of honor. He was first arrested at a protest in May

2010, and shortly afterward Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) showed up at his house and briefly detained his parents. “For folks from a Middle Eastern background, being undocumented is very embarrassing, so that was especially humiliating,” he says. “So I’ve got a personal vendetta against ICE . It’s one thing to come after me, but why go after my family?”

His parents have since legalized their status; their U.S.–born daughter was able to file a visa petition for them when she turned 21. They do not support his activism. “My mom has said, ‘You’re not Mexican,’” Abdollahi says, laughing.

“That’s true. But this affects all of us.”

Viridiana Martinez—friends call her “Viri”—has a strikingly different personality. The 26-year-old leads with her emotions; she can be laughing one minute and crying the next. But she channels that emotion into her activism, summoning righteous indignation on cue. Martinez was born in Monterrey, Mexico, where her father had a relatively cushy office job until 1993, when he was laid off.

Unable to find work, he came to the United States on a tourist visa and started working as a farmhand. The rest of the family soon followed, and Martinez grew up in a small, cozy but cluttered bungalow with a large yard in the rural town of Sanford, North Carolina.

As one of the only Latino kids in her school, she had trouble fitting in. “I remember being stared at like I was some weird object,” she says. But she excelled academically, took AP classes, and in high school became the marching band drum major. “I always wanted to prove, ‘I might be the Mexican girl, but I’ll get as good grades as you. No, I’ll get better grades than you. I’ll speak your language and write it better than you.’”

Martinez dreamed of getting a degree in international relations and working at the United Nations. But like Abdollahi, she got a reality check when she applied to nearby North Carolina State University. The school told her she’d have to pay tuition as a foreign student, which would be more than triple the in-state rate. She couldn’t afford it. “I remember telling my parents, why would you bring us here and put us in this situation?” she says. “‘I can’t move on with

my life, and I don’t know what to do.’ It was hard to find myself saying that, when I knew they came looking for a better life for us. Daddy just wanted to provide for us like any father would.”

Martinez went to work as a cashier at a McDonald’s where her mom was the manager.

It was not what she’d imagined for herself. A few months into the job, she attempted suicide by overdosing on her anxiety meds. “I was grate-

ful to have a job, but you know, I’d worked for so much more,” she says. “Everything just went ‘boom.’” She was hospitalized for several weeks, and when she got out, she found an outlet for her anxiety and her ambitions. It began when she went to a meeting where Representative Luis Gutierrez, a Democrat from Illinois and leading advocate for immigration reform, spoke about building a movement to change the law. “I drank

Viridiana Martinez helped organize women detainees from inside the Broward detention center.

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the Kool-Aid,” Martinez says. She first joined a mainstream group associated with Gutierrez, Reform Immigration for America, but soon helped start the NC Dream Team.

Marco Saavedra is in many ways the most privileged of the three, but he comes from the poorest background. His parents were subsistence farmers in the tiny farming village of San Miguel in the Southwestern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Their first language is Mixtec, not Spanish. When Saavedra was three, they carried him across the Sonoran Desert and then took a plane to New York City, where they settled in Washington Heights. His father started his own food-distribution business; he now runs a Oaxacan restaurant in the South Bronx.

His mother worked as a custodian. When Saavedra was in seventh grade, a teacher at his Harlem middle school recommended him for a program called Prep for Prep that funnels inner-city youth to elite private schools. The

beneath African Americans to beg for rights that belonged inherently to mankind. In his thesis, Saavedra updated that argument for undocumented immigrants. “We have contributed so much to this country,” he says.

“We’re human beings. We have a claim to rights because, yes, they rightfully belong to us.”

IN THE SPRING OF 2010, Saavedra, Martinez,

and Abdollahi met while joining thousands of Dreamers in Washington, D.C., for a mass protest urging passage of the Dream Act, which would give permanent residency to undocumented youth like them. At the time, Washington was obsessed with health care and the stimulus. While some Democrats, including President Obama, still talked about pushing for a comprehensive immigration bill, most insiders thought it had little chance of passing before the 2010 midterms. The Dreamers believed they had a shot, however. In recent years, they

put us through because they think they’ve done something wrong by bringing us here. They want the Dream Act to pass as much as we do.”

Abdollahi favored a more confrontational approach—one that would involve having Dreamers get arrested and risk deportation through sit-ins, hunger strikes, and other actions. It was a tactic that even many of his fellow Dreamers, who wanted the movement to continue putting a sympathetic face forward, opposed. But he and others, including Martinez and Saavedra, went ahead and organized a series of sit-ins across the country. The first took place in Senator John McCain’s office in Arizona on May 17, 2010—the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education—and Abdollahi was dragged out and arrested with four others. Saavedra joined a ten-day hunger strike in front of Senator Charles Schumer’s office in New York to push him to introduce the Dream Act as a stand-alone bill. (The New York Demo-

Inside immigration detention facilities, the activists knew they'd find dozens of wrongfully detained People they could help. program was challenging, but Saavedra finished and was admitted to Deerfield Academy, the prestigious prep school in western Massachusetts. From there he was accepted as a foreign student on a full scholarship to Kenyon College in Ohio, where he studied sociology.

Saavedra is skinny, with short hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He looks like a budding professor and talks like one, too. Explaining NIYA’s confrontational tactics, he told me, “The only way to subvert hegemonic relationships is through the theater of the oppressed.” While his compatriots came to activism because they were pissed off about not being able to attend college, Saavedra is pissed because of what he learned at college. He studied the history of activism and oppression in the United States, and what he learned fueled his anger over his situation. His senior thesis was on W.E.B. Du Bois, the early-20th-century civil-rights leader and sociologist. Saavedra was particularly struck by Du Bois’s argument that it was

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had been staging rallies across the country featuring young undocumented Dreamers, often wearing caps and gowns to symbolize their thwarted ambitions of going to college, outing themselves publicly and telling their stories.

The Dreamers had made themselves a cause célèbre, with even many conservatives expressing sympathy for these young people who were in the country through “no fault of their own.”

But as the activists started meeting with legislators, it became clear that many of their allies in Congress, and some pro-immigrant advocates as well, felt that pushing for a standalone Dream Act, instead of trying to include it in a comprehensive reform bill, would steal the urgency from a true immigration overhaul.

“The congressional Hispanic Caucus told us, ‘Every time you talk about the Dream Act you dismantle the fight for your parents,’” Abdollahi says. “For us that’s never made sense.

All of us have heard our parents cry at night, ashamed of themselves and at the pain they’ve

crat had co-sponsored the Dream Act but at the time said he was working toward comprehensive immigration reform instead.)

Meanwhile, Martinez and her organization, the NC Dream Team, organized a two-week fast outside the offices of Democratic Senator Kay Hagan of North Carolina. “We hunted her down,” Martinez says. “We would go to where she was speaking and confront her. She’d say, ‘You girls need to eat!’ We brought the Dream Act fight to North Carolina.” Hagan kept repeating that she supported a comprehensive bill, but Martinez—new to politics, as they all were—felt sure that the clearly sympathetic Hagan would back the Dream Act if it made it to a vote.

During those protests, the movement began to fray. At times, the conflict between these young immigrants and the old guard burst into view.

In July 2010, Abdollahi and Martinez and five other undocumented youth, wearing caps and gowns, huddled on the carpet of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s office and refused to leave.

Representative Gutierrez, the one who initially inspired Martinez, called them on his cell phone and tried to convince them to back down from their insistence on the Dream Act. “I empathize with your frustration,” he said.

“But every time someone says the whole thing can’t pass, only part of it can pass, it weakens us, it divides us. We want a united movement for comprehensive immigration reform.”

Abdollahi interrupted the congressman, his voice shaking with anger. He told him that he and others had been arrested at the McCain sit-in and had been placed in deportation hearings. “So for you to put down these six youths in this office is a shame,” he said, his voice cracking. “You need to support them.”

The action may have helped to force a vote.

“Within a week, Senator Reid came out and said, ‘I support the Dream Act as a stand-alone bill,” Abdollahi says. “It worked.” On December 8, 2010, the House of Representatives passed the Dream Act. Dreamers streamed into the Capitol the following week, going from office to office lobbying senators. Martinez and Abdollahi were among those who gathered in the Senate gallery for the vote on December 18. But the bill failed by five votes, with five Democrats opposing it: Max Baucus and Jon Tester from Montana, Ben Nelson from Nebraska, Mark Pryor from Arkansas, and, to Martinez’s chagrin, the focus of her efforts, Hagan of North Carolina. “I almost fell off the balcony of the Senate,” remembers Martinez. “I was shocked.”

The failure of the Dream Act jolted Abdollahi, Saavedra, and Martinez. They blamed the very folks they’d been working with: fellow activists who were resistant to using more confrontational tactics. They were even angrier at the “supportive” politicians, including Obama, who they felt hadn’t worked hard enough to pass the Dream Act. So along with a number of other activists and affiliates, they broke off from the large umbrella group of Dreamer activists, United We Dream, and formed the National Immigrant Youth Alliance.

NIYA was intentionally leaderless, free of any overarching structure that would dictate tactics. There are currently 33 NIYA groups in 30 states, and each is free to be as confrontational as it thinks is necessary. “We got tired of advocates speaking for us,” says Abdollahi. “We wanted an autonomous voice. We said, ‘Let’s

Mohammad Abdollahi, who led the Broward campaign from the outside, speaks with police during a protest.

do this on our own and find the youth around the country. Let’s push forward.’”

Two years later, in June 2012, the Dreamers would get much of what they’d lobbied for when Obama announced a policy, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA , that would give Dreamers a reprieve from deportation and provide them with work permits. But the NIYA activists had already moved on to a broader mission. They wanted to challenge the detention and deportation of ordinary, nonviolent immigrants, and they weren’t going to wait for politicians to do it. They were going to stop the deportations themselves—case by case if they had to.

AROUND THE TIME THEY helped Javier de los Santos get out of detention, NIYA was hearing

from people all across the country who needed help saving a family member from deportation.

“It would literally work like dominoes,” Abdollahi says. “We’d do one case, and then we’d have somebody else contact us. Every month we were doing a different case of somebody who would contact us from the previous one.”

NIYA has plenty of sympathetic detainees to choose from. The country started jailing more immigrants two decades ago. In 1995, our immigration system had about 7,500

undocumented immigrants in detention on a daily basis. Last year, Congress mandated that ICE have 34,000 detention beds. As was made clear during a 2012 committee hearing, ICE’s then-director John Morton interpreted that mandate to mean the agency must keep those beds full on a daily basis.

As federal funding for detention has skyrocketed, the nation’s multibillion-dollar private prison industry—primarily the GEO Group and the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), which together spent nearly $45 million on campaign contributions and lobbyists in the last decade—has stepped in to meet the demand. It’s not cheap to detain and deport people. It costs approximately $164 a night for detention and about $23,000 per deportation.

ICE’s annual budget has doubled since 2005, to more than $5.82 billion in 2012. (Not coincidentally, GEO and CCA more than doubled their revenues from immigrant detention between 2005 and 2011, to more than $3 billion.)

Despite the spending, the system was showing serious strains, best symbolized by a growing backlog of pending cases in immigration courts—hundreds of thousands of them. In 2011, amid rising criticism for his aggressive deportation policies, President Obama announced a shift. The administration, he said,

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 53

Dreamers clad in graduation gowns are arrested after a July 2010 sit-in staged at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C.

would focus solely on deporting immigrants convicted of a crime. This was smart politics—it signaled to Latino voters that he was creating a more humane deportation policy—but it also gave ICE new guidelines for allocating the agency’s limited resources. Over the past decade, local police departments had begun checking the immigration status of people they came in contact with, through programs like 287(g) in Charlotte. This had led to a backlog of hundreds of thousands of immigration cases waiting for a hearing in front of a judge.

In a series of directives building on Obama’s policy, ICE’s Morton began to direct immigration officers to focus on criminals and dismiss low-priority cases. The most significant of these memos was released in June 2011. It urged field offices to use “prosecutorial discretion” on a case-by-case basis to release more immigrants from detention and to defer or dismiss deportation proceedings against them. The “Morton memos” listed a broad range of immigrants eligible for relief: those who had been in the country a long time, those who came here as children and would be eligible for the Dream Act, veterans and active-duty members of the military and their families, and immigrants without serious criminal records, among a host of others.

At first, Morton’s directive appeared to

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inspire some changes in the system. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano announced that ICE would review 288,360 cases pending in immigration court.

By this May, prosecutorial discretion had been invoked to dismiss 20,311 cases—around 6 percent of those reviewed. Meanwhile, however, the backlog of immigration cases continued to grow—in May, it stood at 333,433.

Beyond the review process, it’s hard to know how well the memos have been implemented.

ICE doesn’t track how many people in detention are eligible for discretion or have been granted it. As proof of success, officials say that 55 percent of those deported are now immigrants with criminal histories, nearly double the percentage when Obama took office. A senior Department of Homeland Security official, who wishes to remain anonymous, said the memos have made a difference—to an extent. “Are there people in detention eligible for discretion?” he asks. “Sure, but less than any other point in history.”

Morton’s policy—backed by the president— has not been implemented consistently throughout the country, and large numbers of “low priority” undocumented immigrants continue to be detained. One big reason: The memo wasn’t binding, and many ICE officials, backed up by powerful members of Congress,

insisted that it would prevent them from doing their job. Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, accused the Obama administration of trying to “circumvent Congress and give a free pass to illegal immigrants who have already broken our law.”

The union representing 7,000 ICE deportation officers refused to allow its members to participate in a training course on implementing Morton’s directives. Chris Crane, head of the National ICE Council, argues that “special interests,” by which he means proimmigrant groups, have hijacked immigration policies. “Obama has hired people to run the agency who have radical beliefs,” he says.

“They want to stop immigration enforcement and stop holding people in custody.” That, he says, is outside the law. He claims the Morton memos have put dangerous criminals back on the street, like illegal immigrants who drive without licenses. Now, Crane says, “we have to wait until they kill you.”

David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, says the Morton memos have been sporadically implemented at best. “It’s good in theory, but it hasn’t made much of a difference in real life,” he says. “The problem is, the criminals know enough not to open the door when ICE comes

knocking. They become fugitives. It’s easier to catch law-abiding immigrants.”

The implementation of Obama and Morton’s policy was further muddled by the congressional appropriations bill that mandated that ICE have 34,000 detention center beds. According to Representative Ted Deutch of Florida, a Democrat, ICE officials are being told, on one hand, to use discretion to let people out—and, on the other, to keep the beds full. “That, it seems, is why most people who come through the door end up staying.”

IN JULY 2012, ABDOLLAHI, Saavedra, Martinez, and two other NIYA activists piled into

a car and headed to Florida. They planned to infiltrate the Broward Transitional Center, a GEO detention facility near Fort Lauderdale that houses only low-priority cases. Broward appeared to embody the contradictory nature of immigration policy. ICE had held up the

large commercial port near the Broward detention center. They’d heard of immigrants being detained by the security and the cops stationed there. The would-be infiltrator put on dirty jeans and a T-shirt to look the part of a day laborer and headed toward the guard station at the port’s entrance. “I’m speaking in Spanish, saying ‘Estoy buscando el trabajo. A job. A job,’” Saavedra recalls. “I’m saying ‘job’ like it’s the only English word I know.” But the guard just said that he couldn’t let him in unless he had an appointment with specific business.

Saavedra walked away and called Abdollahi and Martinez. They told him to try again, so he went back and started acting desperate, telling the guard he had no money or food in Spanish and bad English. Finally, the guard took the bait and called over a policeman who was guarding the port. The officer ambled up to the guard station and greeted Saavedra in his minimal Spanish, “Cómo estás?” But even

long before Saavedra let it “slip” that he had crossed the border with his friend and was also here illegally. Before long, he was in handcuffs.

Since Saavedra’s Dreamer status would keep him from being detained, he lied and said he crossed the border as an adult. As he was processed, the officer looked at his arrest record and found the civil-disobedience offense from the McCain sit-in. “And then the agent says, ‘You look like a bag-and-ready case,” Saavedra recalls. “And that’s the only time I freaked out.

I’m thinking, ‘A re they going to put me on a fast track to deportation?’”

THE DAY OF SAAVEDRA’S arrest, a Broward

detainee named Claudio Rojas got a phone call.

“My son called me that night,” Rojas remembers. “He said he had a surprise for me, and that I would find out.”

Rojas had been in Broward for five months.

His lawyer had been arguing, without success,

These dreamers were going to stop the immigrant detentions and deportations themselves---case by case if they had to. facility as a model of a kinder, gentler immigration system. The argument went that, since immigration violations are not usually a jailable offense, then detention centers shouldn’t feel like jail—they should feel like a motel, except you can’t leave. In Broward, detainees have flat-screen TVs in their rooms and are free to roam the facility for most of the day. But why were they locked up in the first place? Most of the inmates at Broward shouldn’t be detained if ICE were following the guidelines laid out by Obama and Morton.

Broward is segregated by gender, so the plan was for Martinez to get herself detained and organize among the women at Broward, while Saavedra would be arrested and organize the men. Abdollahi would lead the campaign from outside Broward, publicizing the plights of the unjustly detained immigrants in the center.

There was an immediate hitch: It turned out that it wasn’t so easy to get arrested. The activists dropped off Saavedra at Port Everglades, a

the cop wouldn’t take the bait. “He’s continually saying, ‘Don’t tell me you’re illegal. Don’t tell me you’re illegal.’ And to shoo me away, he offers me five bucks to get on the bus,” Saavedra says. “I don’t even look down at the money.

It’s so out of left field, it’s not part of the script.”

It seems odd that it would be so hard for an undocumented immigrant to get arrested.

But Saavedra says the experience is actually, from a certain slant, an accurate snapshot of the undocumented experience: You never know when you’ll be detained or not, he says.

“It seems so arbitrary—who’s going to be a sympathetic person, and who’s going to, like, not be.

It’s an anecdote of what really happens to folks.”

The next day, Saavedra took a more direct route. He was dropped off in front of a Border Patrol station in an industrial area near Port Everglades. He walked into the gated office and started asking about a missing friend who’d likely been picked up by Border Patrol agents.

The officer spoke Spanish, and it didn’t take

that he was a Morton Memo case. Rojas had been picked up because his son was driving his car without a license. He had no criminal record. He was a hardworking gardener in his late forties with kids. He paid his taxes. He was devoutly Christian. He’d been in the U.S. for 12 years. Rojas was also a people person, which made him a natural organizer. While talking to other prisoners, he had realized there were many there like him who should get out under ICE’s own policy. He’d begun collecting names and passing them on to his son on the outside.

His son, after hearing about NIYA’s success with “working cases,” had contacted Abdollahi.

Rojas was one of the primary reasons NIYA had chosen Broward as the place to send Saavedra and Martinez. But he was in the dark about their plans, except for the cryptic phone call from his son. The next day, Rojas woke up to a knock on his door. It was Saavedra. “He said, ‘I know your son.’ He told me that he was here to help me,” Rojas recalls. “I was shocked, ‘You

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came to help me?’ And then I told him, ‘Well, let’s get to work.’ We didn’t waste a second.”

The next day, they started moving through the facility, interviewing the 600 men housed there. Broward is low security. Except for the walls around the perimeter, it could be mistaken for a low-budget retirement home. It’s painted pastel pink. There’s a courtyard with palm trees and a volleyball court. The rooms are usually unlocked. “Within a few days we had talked to everyone and distributed a hotline they could call,” Rojas says.

Abdollahi and the others had set up in another activist’s house nearby, and they started covering the walls with easel-size paper filled with details from cases of people that Saavedra and Rojas and Martinez were finding inside. The NIYA “hotline” was initially Abdollahi’s personal cell phone. Within a week, he says, he was getting phone calls from detainees or their families every minute. “We realized we couldn’t do this with just one phone,” he says.

“So we set up a line that would go to different people working across the country. From 7 A.M. to 11 P.M., we were fielding calls. The only time we’d take breaks was when the detainees were locked in their rooms. We’d sneak to the beach at 1 A.M. for a break.”

Abdollahi and his team took this information and started calling family members, figuring out who had the strongest cases—and which families were willing to help NIYA mount the kind of campaign it would take to get them out. They chose about 70 and started building campaigns around them. They put up Internet petitions with sympathetic details about the detainees, listing the name and contact number of a senator and congressman in the detainee’s area along with a sample script of what to tell their office. They called local media to get the detainees’ stories told. Telemundo and Univision aired stories. Families and church groups helped to get the word out, organized vigils, called lawmakers—anything that might pressure ICE to release their loved ones.

The first victory came quickly. Saavedra and Rojas had met a Dreamer who’d spent five months in Broward after being picked up one night for being in a park after hours. After The Chavez family (top) and Samuel Soto (bottom) rally at Broward for the release of their relatives.

56 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JUL /AUG 2013

NIYA put up a petition telling his story, he was

released immediately.

A FEW DAYS AFTER SAAVEDRA’S arrest, Mar-

tinez infiltrated the women’s side of Broward.

Before she got to work finding promising cases, she had a tough call to make—telling her parents what she’d done and where she was. “I told my mom,” Martinez says. “And she was like, ‘Why are you doing this? And I was like, ‘Mom, because it could be you. And it’s not right that people go through this, you know? So I need to go in and see what’s going on. And you say you have faith and go to church and have faith in God. Well, it’s time to put that into practice.

I’m going to be fine.’” Her mother tried to understand, she says. Her father, on the other hand, “always says, ‘If you’re ready to go to Mexico, then go right ahead.’ I’m like, ‘OK, dad. Thanks.’”

Broward housed many fewer female detainees than males—only around 150—and Marti-

have protection under the Violence Against Women Act,” Martinez says. “And she’s eligible for release since she has three kids that are citizens.”

Ramirez-Amaya had been arrested on questionable charges and landed in Broward.

Once inside, she experienced excessive menstrual bleeding, which is common among rape victims. A month later, she says, she was too weak to walk and was finally taken to the hospital. “They tested my blood and told me I was anemic,” she says. “They told me I’m lucky because I didn’t have enough blood in my body. I was going to pass away.” The doctors gave her a transfusion and operated on her ovaries, then sent her back to Broward. But she says the clinic there didn’t provide the right medications, a mixture of hormonal medications and vitamins, and after a few days, she was found in the bathroom in a pool of her own blood and ended up back in the hospital.

with Telemundo and Univision, the secret was out. “That’s on every TV,” Martinez says. “And so everyone’s like, ‘La Infiltradora! She’s here!’”

The day after they gave the TV interviews, she and Saavedra were called to meet with an ICE officer. “She told us, ‘You meet the requirements for release,’” Martinez recalls. “I said, ‘Why aren’t you releasing all the other people who meet the requirements?’ And she told me, ‘I’m not in the business of telling you about other people’s cases.’”

They were told to provide the phone number of someone who could pick them up.

Instead, they gave the officer a list of people they thought should be released, including Ramirez-Amaya and Rojas, and told her they weren’t leaving until they were all released. The woman scoffed, and shortly after they were forcibly escorted from Broward.

After Saavedra was let out, around 500 men gathered in the courtyard. They didn’t know if

Within a week of infiltrating Broward, the group was getting phone calls from detainees or their families every minute. nez found that they were extremely reluctant to talk. “It was hard. I didn’t have anyone like Claudio [Rojas],” she says. “And, for most of these women, being detained was not the biggest battle in their life. They were dealing with issues like domestic violence and rape.” But after a few days, they began to tell Martinez their stories.

One of the first was Norma Ramirez-Amaya, who hadn’t known what to make of Martinez at first. “Everybody was thinking she was out of her mind,” Ramirez-Amaya recalls. “What can she do for us? She was in the same position I was—illegal. It was kind of hard to understand how she could help me.”

Ramirez-Amaya had grown up in Mexico and crossed the U.S. border for the first time when she was 12, without her immediate family. The cousins who brought her over had promised to pay her for domestic work but never did. After marrying, she was abused by her husband, which made her eligible for a visa as a victim of domestic violence. “She should

Throughout all this, Ramirez-Amaya says the attendants at the Broward clinic showed remarkably little sympathy. “When I was really sick, they were making jokes like ‘She’s probably like that because she got raped,’” Ramirez says tearfully. “And that hurt me bad because that was right. I’d told them about that when it first happened. That was really hard.”

It took Martinez several days to convince Ramirez-Amaya to go public with her story. “I told Norma, ‘Trust me. This is going to work.

You have a lot in your favor,’” says Martinez.

The team on the outside set up an online campaign and, less than a month later, immigration officers came to Ramirez-Amaya’s room and told her she was getting released. “I felt like I was flying in that moment,” she says.

AFTER TWO WEEKS INSIDE, Saavedra and

Martinez had interviewed all the detainees.

On Broward’s pay phones, they began to do interviews with media outlets. After they spoke

the infiltrator was being released or deported, and they were worried about him. “Nobody could calm these people down,” Rojas says.

“One of the GEO agents came up to me, he had treated me well, and now he asked me to help him. I told him to give me an assurance that Marco was let go. He called over the official who had signed his release papers. And then I went outside and calmed everyone down.”

When Saavedra was released, Rojas was 12 days into what he calls a “spiritual fast.” It didn’t begin as a strike or a protest, he says, but rather as his way of showing his faith in God and asking for help. That weekend, however, Rojas organized a hunger strike inside the facility. Hundreds of detainees skipped their meals. Saavedra, Martinez, and the other activists held a march on the outside, with a banner broadcasting the news of the hunger strike happening inside. “It was a way to exert pressure,” Rojas says. “A symbol. To show them that we could unite. So they had

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 57

to reconsider how they were dealing with us.”

Rojas says things started to change. “The system opened up, because information was finally getting out. The officials that were in there before—the ones who would say, ‘No matter what your attorney says, we’re going to deport you’—they were transferred out.” Most important, people began to be released. Rojas says there was a paper hanging on the wall with the 25 or so cases that the immigration judge would hear every day. Before they started organizing, maybe two would be granted bond each day. Suddenly, it was more like 15 out of 25 being released. “We could see the system open up,” Rojas says. “Next to the names on the paper, it read ‘bond, bond, bond.’”

The NIYA activists continued working on Broward cases for months after the infiltration.

They estimate that they helped to free between 50 and 70 detainees. Marc Moore, ICE’s Miami field office director, denies that NIYA’s efforts

wouldn’t abscond before his next court date.

NIYA’s bold action drew attention to Broward and its low-priority detainees. In October 2012, 26 members of Congress sent a letter to ICE Director Morton demanding an investigation of Broward and a review of every detainee being held there. The letter specifically refers to Ramirez-Amaya’s case, saying she did not receive “necessary treatment for serious medical conditions.” So far, according to Congressman Deutch, who organized the letter to ICE and whose district includes Broward, the agency has rebuffed the call for an investigation, saying that it already reviews detainees on a case-by-case basis.

Still, there have been changes inside Broward. The detainees who remained after the NIYA infiltration have continued to organize; shortly after the letter from members of Congress, around 450 Broward detainees wrote their own letter to Morton decrying their situ-

the Activists are not banking on even a comprehensive immigration bill dismantling the current detention system. led to any releases. It’s impossible to know how many cases can be credited to NIYA’s effort, since the immigrants could have been released for other reasons and other groups are working to help the wrongly detained. But the activists can point to cases where the individuals were detained for months and then, after NIYA got involved, were released—often without explanation.

Rojas is one of them. On August 31, after being in Broward for seven months, Rojas was called into an immigration official’s office and told that he was being released. “I wanted to surprise my wife,” he says. “But I couldn’t remember my P.O. box number so I had to call her. She started to cry. I told her, ‘They say come get me. They’re letting me out right now.’”

Rojas is now living with his wife and son in Miami, in a trailer with a tidy garden. He has a work permit and a driver’s license, although he has to check in with ICE periodically and was recently given an ankle bracelet to wear so he

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ation. In November, according to the Miamibased nonprofit Americans for Immigrant Justice, which has also advocated for changes in Broward, ICE agreed under pressure to put a new assistant field office director in charge of Broward. The attorneys say the new leadership is more responsive to requests to release detainees than the last one. Still, they say, the majority of detainees simply shouldn’t be there.

AFTER BEING RELEASED from Broward,

Martinez stayed in Florida until February, working cases from Broward and other detention centers. She’s now back in North Carolina, continuing to publicize detainees’ plights while lobbying to pass a bill that would give driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants. Saavedra returned to New York for six months to help his parents in their South Bronx restaurant. He’s now in Kentucky, doing faith-based organizing and working cases. Abdollahi travels the country helping NIYA affiliates train and fire up activists.

Abdollahi says there are dozens of groups now working deportation cases. In all, he estimates they’ve done around a thousand cases and have been successful at getting people out of detention around 90 percent of the time.

(Those figures are impossible to verify.) Abdollahi believes that exposing what’s happening on the ground will eventually inspire changes in the law. “It’s the best way because it’s authentic,” he says. “It’s what the community wants instead of working top-down. Let’s work locally, and at some point it creates problems for the powers that be.”

This spring, the NIYA activists were watching the progress of yet another immigrationreform bill. They learned the hard way, in 2010, not to hold their breath waiting for politicians to act. But the action at Broward exposed flaws in the detention system that the Senate version of immigration reform would mitigate. Most profoundly, it would put the legal burden on ICE to prove that there’s a

(Left) Marcos Saavedra embraces Viridiana Martinez after her release from Broward; (right) NIYA member Felipe Vargas conducts a civil-disobedience training exercise with Dulce Guerrero.

reason to keep someone in detention. “It’s the complete opposite of how the system functions now,” says Muzaffar Chishti, a lawyer with the Migration Policy Institute. “Now ICE has to be convinced there’s a reason to let someone out. This bill would make the established preference not to detain.” The bill would expand the use of alternative methods, like ankle bracelets. It would also outsource the responsibility for making sure immigrants show up at hearings, to nonprofits and service agencies or the individuals themselves.

“So, a church, for instance, could say that they’ll take responsibility for 50 immigrants and assure ICE that they’ll show up for their hearings,” Chishti says. “This is a pioneering community-based system, and to write that into law is pretty interesting.”

But Chishti, like many reform advocates, believes that “at best, the law has a 50-50 chance of passing this year.” The sticking point will likely come with conservative Republicans in the House who oppose a path to citizenship. “The majority of the Republican caucus will not support immigration reform,” Chishti says. “Will Speaker Boehner allow this to come to the floor when it doesn’t have the support of the majority?” On June 18, John Boehner announced that he would not allow a vote with-

out majority-Republican support, lengthening the odds of passage.

Abdollahi is helping organize another action in Washington with hundreds of immigrant youth in July. Once again, they’ll visit lawmakers, push for reform, and raise a ruckus. But they’re not banking on even a comprehensive bill dismantling the detention system, and they have reason to be skeptical beyond Washington gridlock. The Department of Homeland Security budget for next year includes only a slight decrease in funding for detention beds, from 34,000 to 32,800.

And when I toured the Broward facility this spring, officials pointed out fresh construction: They’re enlarging the area where they initially process and evaluate new detainees. Even as lawmakers work to end the system as it stands, GEO is expanding Broward.

Martinez says that she’s not expecting an immigration bill to fix the problem. “We can’t really wait for things to just happen—for Obama to wake up on the right side of the bed or something,” she says. “We have to pressure them into making things happen. It means putting yourself on the line. It means continuing to infiltrate detention centers, exposing what’s going on inside. This needs changing— not next week, not next month, but now.”

In April, Martinez and Abdollahi were together again, in a small two-bedroom apartment in Raleigh, North Carolina. They’d come to train two new infiltrators, young NIYA activists Claudia Munoz and Dulce Guerrero. The two were headed for a detention center in Michigan, where ICE detainees are held in a jail alongside criminals. It’s one of seven infiltrations NIYA plans for upcoming months. Abdollahi and Martinez pretended to handcuff and arrest the two activists, pulling their arms back and kicking their feet apart. But mostly they focused on the mission that has animated NIYA from the start: helping undocumented immigrants transcend their fears.

Martinez told the new recruits how the processing works, how to make sure they don’t check the box that means they’ve agreed to be deported. She gave them tips on gaining people’s trust inside. She told them not to get overwhelmed by the painful stories they’re going to hear from other detainees. “Just take a breather,” she says. “On some days you feel, ‘Oh my god, this is so overwhelming, I wasn’t expecting this.’ Don’t get hung up on it. Go ahead, cry it out. You’re an instrument to get out these cases and let them know there is an option for them to get out. But don’t dwell on stuff that brings you down, you have to be strong.” 

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 59

60 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JUL /AUG 2013

SWEAT & TEARS Western multinationals are behind disasters like the Bangladesh factory collapse.

Will public outrage and a new agreement with unions lead to improvements for workers?

khur shed rinku / ap images

BY ROBERT KUTTNER

n April 24, the Rana Plaza garment fac- ruptcy of a voluntary system of industry-sponsored factory tory in Bangladesh collapsed, killing 1,129 certification by nonprofits funded by the big fashion brands. workers and injuring at least 1,500 more.

In August 2012, one of the most prestigious monitoring Most were young women earning about $37 groups, Social Accountability International, gave a factory a month, or a bit more than a dollar a day. The owned by Ali Enterprises in Karachi, Pakistan, a clean collapse was the worst disaster in the history of the global bill of health. A month later, the factory burned, killing garment industry, evoking the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fac- some 300 workers who were trapped behind locked doors. tory fire in New York City. The Rana Plaza factory made In January 2012, Apple selected the monitoring group apparel for more than a dozen major international fashion Fair Labor Association (FLA) to review conditions in the brands, including Benetton, J.C. Penney, and Wal-Mart. This factories of Foxconn, its contractor in China. Two weeks was the third major industrial accident in Bangladesh since later, The New York Times published an exposé of grim November, when 112 people were killed in a fire at a garment conditions, including 70-hour workweeks and a spate of factory producing mainly for Wal-Mart. At Rana Plaza, worker suicides. In February, the head of the FLA toured cracks appeared in the eight-story building the day before it Foxconn and pronounced the facilities “first class.” collapsed. Police ordered an evacuation of the building. But Thanks to the notoriety of the Rana Plaza collapse survivors say they were told that their pay would be docked and the persistence of the global labor movement, anti-­ if they did not return to the factory floor, and most did. sweatshop activists in the U.S. and Europe, and an indeBangladesh, a nation of more than 160 million, has some 4 pendent, labor-affiliated advocacy group, the Worker million garment-industry workers and 40 building inspectors. Rights Consortium (WRC), the tragedy in Bangladesh After China, it is the world’s second-largest apparel producer: could open the door to more robust corporate accounta destination of choice for the fashion industry ability. A legally binding contract, signed May because workers effectively have no rights and are A fire killed 112 workers 15 by some 40 fashion brands, commits the big in November at the among the world’s most desperately poor people. retailers and apparel producers to take responTazreen Fashions These tragedies underscored not just the brutality sibility for what happens in the factories that garment factory in Savar, Bangladesh. of the global garment industry but also the bankmake the clothing they sell.

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 61

Under the Accord on Building and Fire Safety in Bangladesh, the Western fashion companies will invest millions of dollars in factory improvements and provide longer-term supply contracts so that factory owners have the cash flow and confidence to invest in upgrades. The brands agree to independent safety inspections whose results are made public, with binding arbitration in the event of disputes and an enforceable commitment by the brands to terminate business with factories that do not meet safety standards. A seven-person committee enforces the agreement, with three members from labor groups, three from the fashion brands, and a representative of the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Geneva, a U.N.–affiliated

Instead, Wal-Mart, the Gap, and 15 other North American brands have created a rival, purely voluntary agreement.

Their plan for better factory safety, announced in early July with the Bipartisan Policy Center providing the window dressing, has no arm’s-length monitoring, no penalties, no enforceable rights, and no role for unions.

Depending on how well it is enforced, the European accord could be a turning point that could lead to a new wave of rights for workers in Third World manufacturing. “The business model of the apparel industry logically leads to sweatshops,” says Scott Nova, executive director of the WRC. “The Bangladesh accord holds the promise of altering the model.

But we expect that there will be extensive battles ahead.”

Bangladesh garment workers are paid 18 cents an hour to produce clothing for Western consumers.

watchdog body founded in 1919 to promote worker rights, as chair and tiebreaker. The agreement, however, is about safety. It does not address wages per se, but it does commit the fashion brands to require the large factories they purchase from to allow union representatives to help train factory workers in safety monitoring. Sponsors hope that a union presence will lead to better wages.

By July, some 70 major European fashion brands and retailers with production in Bangladesh had signed the accord. Only a handful of U.S. companies joined, including PVH (the parent company of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger), Sean John, and Abercrombie & Fitch. Although Europe purchases more than double the volume of clothes from Bangladesh than the United States does, the deal would be more significant if the bigger American retailers such as Wal-Mart and the Gap joined, since both have resisted codes of conduct with independent monitoring and enforcement.

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a way that almost guarantees a race to the bottom for its workers and a convenient distancing of the global fashion brands from the conditions of work. Typically, the fashion brand outsources not just the production but the organization of the entire supply chain. A $20 billion Hong Kong– based firm that most people have never hard of, Li & Fung, dominates the intermediary business. According to Robert Ross of Clark University, author of Slaves to Fashion and an expert on the global apparel industry, “The fashion brands and retailers go to Li & Fung with a design, a price point, and projected volume, and they say, ‘Find me a factory.’” Li & Fung, with more than 7,700 clients and 15,000 suppliers, invariably finds several competing factories to keep the pressure on for low prices and wages. So, when a disaster occurs, the retailer is at two levels of remove. It doesn’t own the factory, and it didn’t organize the production chain.

After the factory collapse in Bangladesh, for instance, Wal-Mart insisted that the Fame Jeans sold in its stores had been produced at Rana Plaza by a subcontractor without its knowledge. Fame Jeans in turn blamed “a rogue employee.”

But the entire production system is designed to promote this denial of accountability. Large factories in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Vietnam, or Cambodia might produce for 10 or 20 different brands. The brands and their intermediaries keep the factory owners on contracts of just a few months, so that if a rival factory offers a cheaper price, it will get the business.

In the negotiations for the Bangladesh deal, the breakthrough came when H&M agreed to sign. The largest purchaser of clothing made in Bangladesh and the world’s second-largest apparel retailer with some 2,900 stores in 43 countries, H&M happens to be a Swedish multinational.

Sweden has a long history of powerful trade unions and widely accepted collaboration between management and labor. Unlike every major U.S. fashion company, H&M is a union shop at home. When the Rana Plaza catastrophe occurred, it was a major embarrassment to H&M management. Inditex, the world’s largest apparel retailer, quickly

a .m. ahad / ap images

THE $1.5 TRILLION GARMENT industry is structured in

agreed to the accord. Based in Galicia, Spain, Inditex has 5,500 stores worldwide under several different brand names such as Zara.

The accord is a welcome change, but it is just a first step.

With the Bangladeshi government allied with factory owners, the government could well undermine the agreement.

Bangladesh has pursued the strategy of gaining market share by having the world’s lowest wages for garment workers. The current minimum wage translates to about 18 cents an hour, up from 10 cents in 2010. Labor activists say a living wage is more like $1.20 an hour—probably the world’s widest gap between the legal minimum wage and a minimally decent standard of living. Although new union rights are promised in the accord, there could well be a proliferation of company unions and protracted wrangling over which entities are bona fide unions. The plan could lead to extensive jockeying between companies and factory owners over who is responsible for investing in upgraded safety conditions, as well as conflicts among the brands over which must invest how much in improved standards. The crunch will come when a factory fails to live up to the accord and the brands are pressured to drop it as a supplier. Since other apparel producers such as Vietnam and Pakistan are eager to displace Bangladesh, the race to the bottom is likely to continue until higher standards are mandated worldwide.

THE MODERN ANTI-SWEATSHOP movement, based on

naming and shaming brands through consumer pressure, began in the mid-1990s. As global production chains were created by the industry, Third World factory conditions proliferated both globally and in the United States. In 1995, in El Monte, California, police found 72 Thai workers locked inside a factory producing clothes for major U.S. retailers, working 18 hours a day for less than a dollar an hour. With exposés of near–slave labor conditions in global factories of such brands as Reebok, Levi Strauss, and Kathie Lee Gifford’s line of clothing, the companies moved to devise corporate codes of conduct. This led to a strategy of using voluntary organizations like Social Accountability International to monitor and certify labor conditions, which the big brands hoped would satisfy consumer concerns without raising their costs.

During the same period, college students began demanding that their universities set minimum labor standards as a condition of approving licenses to manufacture products with college logos. President Bill Clinton was instrumental in helping universities, corporations, and unions create the Fair Labor Association in 1999. But the FLA was compromised by its need to win the cooperation of the big brands. The unions soon quit, in favor of the more independent Worker Rights Consortium. Unlike the FLA , the consortium promotes union organizing and issues detailed

and scathing reports on sweatshop conditions. Each organization has about 200 university members that pledge to hold garment producers accountable to codes of conduct.

Today, many universities are affiliated with both groups.

The limitation of the FLA approach is that fashion brands affiliate voluntarily. They agree to create their own codes, and the FLA hires monitors to certify whether factories that produce for the brands are in compliance.

But because the whole program is voluntary, the FLA has proceeded gingerly.

Even so, the reputational concerns of the brands and the existence of the FLA have given more aggressive groups such as the WRC and the labor movement useful leverage. For example, in 2008 a member company of the FLA , Russell Athletic/Fruit of the Loom, closed a factory in Honduras rather than recognize the workers’ decision to unionize. The FLA resisted taking any action against

Depending on how well it is policed, the Accord on Building and Fire Safety in Bangladesh could be a turning point that could lead to a new wave of rights in Third World manufacturing.

Russell. Eventually, some 100 universities, mobilized by the WRC and United Students Against Sweatshops, denied Russell licenses to make products with their logos, and the company finally agreed not only to reopen the factory but to allow others in Honduras to unionize.

DESPITE OCCASIONAL BREAKTHROUGHS, the Russell

agreement and the Bangladesh accord are fragile exceptions. They still depend heavily on consumer pressure on the reputational concerns of large multinational corporations.

In the absence of direct government legal standards, the strategy requires endless investigation and publicity—and the big brands have far deeper pockets than the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and more staying power than cohorts of college students that turn over every four years.

One key complement, which the WRC and the unions strongly support, is far greater government involvement in the regulation of working conditions both domestically and globally. A potential but seldom used lever is trade law.

Corporations, after all, have invested massively in changing trade law to increase their global freedom of movement.

Trade law might also cover workers’ rights, but for the most part it doesn’t except at the level of platitude.

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 63

Member nations of the World Trade Organization benefit from what used to be called “most favored nation” treatment—they get the same tariffs as those imposed on the most favored nation. The list of tariffs is known as the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP). In 2007, the AFL-CIO filed a petition requesting that Bangladesh be removed from the list of GSP countries because of its repeated violation of even the most minimal labor rights.

The Bush administration rejected the petition. This June, the Obama administration acted to suspend GSP status for Bangladesh, but the action is largely symbolic because exports admitted under the GSP affect only about 1 percent of Bangladesh’s overall exports to the U.S. and do not include clothing. Still, the move is a diplomatic slap and adds some (minimal) government pressure on the Bangladeshi government, but the U.S. could do more.

Government-to-government pressure would reinforce

Our own history in the 20th century suggests what it will take to rid the world of sweatshops—enforceable rights and effective unions. Yet that progress has been reversed. accords like the Bangladesh safety deal. The European Union is also reviewing whether Bangladesh qualifies for favorable tariff treatment. Activists hope that the combination of bad publicity, the risk of losing favorable tariffs, the new contract with the big fashion brands, and increased worker pressure on the ground will alter Bangladesh’s export strategy. Enforceable rights to organize or join unions, a stronger health and safety code, and a higher minimum wage would put more teeth in what is still a private accord that deals primarily with safety and relies on the highly fickle concerns of consumers, most of whom are more interested in price and fashion than in labor rights.

The U.S. government, architect of trade deals that mainly serve industry and finance, could add labor rights to the mix. But then the U.S. has failed to enforce labor rights at home—including the fundamental right to organize or join a union, supposedly guaranteed by the 1935 Wagner Act. To get a glimmer of the progress that might be made if governments got involved, consider a brief interlude when the United States intervened on behalf of labor rights in one poor country, Cambodia. The story begins with the Clinton administration’s embrace of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a deal conceived by

64 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JUL /AUG 2013

industry and negotiated by the outgoing administration of George H.W. Bush. NAFTA was advertised as a trade agreement, but its most important provisions opened Mexico to massive direct investment by U.S. corporations and defined many health, safety, and environmental regulations as obstacles to trade. As a candidate in 1992, Clinton called for meaningful labor provisions as part of NAFTA , but the eventual “side agreement” on labor rights had no teeth. Most Mexican unions are pawns of the government, and the independent ones are subject to persecution.

Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, president of the Mexican mining and metalworking union, one of the few legitimate ones, has been in exile in Canada for seven years, fearing arrest.

NAFTA was approved by Congress in 1993, over the fierce objection of the unions and with about two-thirds of House Democrats voting no. Clinton got it through mainly with the support of Republicans. When Clinton came back for new authority in 1997 to negotiate more trade deals, the House rejected his request. So the administration began discussions with the unions to see what kind of labor provisions might win their support. The administration was particularly eager to make a trade agreement with Cambodia, which was just emerging from the Killing Fields years under the Khmer Rouge and desperately needed access to U.S. consumer markets. In those years, textile and apparel imports were allocated according to a national quota system, known as the Multi-Fiber Arrangement. In yearlong discussions with Clinton officials, leaders of the apparel and textile union UNITE proposed a novel approach. As part of the trade deal, the Cambodian government would enforce workers’ rights to organize and join unions. If Cambodia kept its word, it would benefit from a significant increase in its import quotas.

“The administration didn’t exactly take our version,” recalls Mark Levinson, one of the union’s architects of the plan. “We proposed more power for unions and workers in Cambodia.

They accepted the broad idea of trading a quota increase for labor rights but brought in the ILO to oversee it.”

Thus did the U.S.–Cambodia free-trade deal come to include the world’s only enforceable labor rights as part of a trade agreement. Under the U.S.–Cambodia Bilateral Textile Agreement, signed in January 1999, Cambodia received a bonus export quota to the U.S. if its labor practices were found to be in compliance. Thanks to the agreement, Cambodia’s clothing exports increased from $26 million in 1995 to $1.9 billion in 2004, representing 80 percent of its industrial exports. Wages increased, and unions not only gained a foothold in the apparel industry but also were able to negotiate contracts with major hotels such as Raffles. But under another trade pact, the entire multi-fiber quota system was gradually phased out over a ten-year period ending in 2004, and fashion brands were now able to look for the cheapest producer worldwide.

Freed from quota constraints, China quickly became the world’s largest exporter of clothing, other nations cut costs to match China’s price, and the United States gave up its leverage to reward Cambodia for respecting labor rights.

By 2004, Cambodia’s factory owners were repressing trade unions, hauling union leaders into court and holding them financially responsible for losses due to strikes. Government, fearing a loss of Cambodia’s global market share and no longer having any reward for enforcing workers’ rights, was siding with the industry. The popular leader of Cambodia’s largest union, Chea Vichea, was assassinated.

Between 2001 and 2011, wages in Cambodia’s garment industry fell 17 percent. The ILO’s monitoring program continues, but cooperation with it has evaporated. Factories have shifted more workers to short-term employment contracts. Trade union members are routinely fired. Illegal overtime has increased, as has child labor. This deterioration has intensified even though the purchasers of garments made in Cambodia are international brands such as Nike, Disney, and H&M, all of which have corporate codes of conduct.

U.S. dropped by 48 percent. Wages continued to decline.

Defenders of Third World sweatshops often argue that they benefit American consumers by providing low-priced products. Yet the factory worker receives only a pittance of the retail price. You could double the wage, and the final price would only rise by a percentage point or two. Meanwhile, Americans are under pressure to lower their own wages to be competitive globally. The truth is that workers in the U.S. and in Bangladesh are common victims of the larger production system.

Our own history in the mid-20th century suggests what it will take to rid the world of sweatshops—enforceable rights and effective unions. Yet in the past several decades,

andrew bir a j / reuter s / l andov

AFTER TWO MAJOR STRIKES, in 1909 and 1910, and the

Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911, organizers rode the wave of worker militancy and public outrage to increase union membership of New York’s garment factories. With the period of full employment during World War I, unionization in the garment trades peaked at 129,000, despite having little protection from government. But in the 1920s, the industry managed to weaken the unions with a technique identical to the one used by the big fashion brands today.

Instead of producing in their own factories, they contracted with “jobbers” and subcontractors, both to disperse the workforce and to diffuse responsibility for the appalling conditions. The economic collapse of the Great Depression reduced union membership even further.

The garment unions recovered only when the Franklin Roosevelt administration first guaranteed the right to unionize in 1933 and 1935, complemented by wage and hours laws in 1938, and then applied strict enforcement of union rights in war production contracts. Sidney Hillman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and FDR’s top labor adviser, served as associate director of the Office of Production Management, which was responsible for all war production. It took both union militancy and the help of the government to win organized labor a tenuous foothold in America’s implicit social contract. For a couple of generations, unions were part of the industrial landscape in America, and sweatshops vanished, until the progress was reversed by globalization. Between 1989 and 2010, as the Multi-Fiber Arrangement was replaced by a global free-for-all, productivity in global apparel production steadily rose, and the price of garments imported into the

that progress has been reversed. Sweatshops have returned to the United States as well as to Bangladesh. In the best case, the Bangladesh accord will open up the possibility for modest improvements in wages and working conditions and for organizing unions. It represents a rare instance of corporations agreeing to binding constraints on their behavior and that of their contractors. With sufficient consumer and union pressure, it could become a template for agreements in other countries.

Accords like this one may be the best available for now, given the failure of the U.S. government to tie labor conditions to trade deals. Still, one has to wonder what might happen if the millions of volunteer and NGO hours devoted to monitoring and publicizing corporate behavior were spent instead on organizing unions—and organizing to elect American progressives, so that our government insisted on labor rights in trade agreements and defended rights at home. 

Clothes with Disney labels lie among debris in the aftermath of the Tazreen Fashions factory fire in Savar, Bangladesh.

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 65

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Take Me Out with the Crowd Can numbers-happy fantasy sports replace team play as a metaphor for the American way of living? BY ABBY RAPOPORT S

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ative Texans living elsewhere raise their children to be expats, fluent in the motherland’s culture. So, growing up in Virginia, I was well versed in the six flags of Texas and the Battle of the Alamo. I learned from my grandfather to shape my chubby toddler hands into the

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“Hook ’Em” shape every University of Texas fan knows. I understood that our family cheered for the Dallas Cowboys, and never the Washington Redskins. In baseball, in good, bad, and heartwrenchingly disappointing times, we pulled for the Houston Astros, the team my father had rooted for

since 1962, when (as the Colt .45s) they became the first major league team in Texas.

My earliest baseball love was the Astros’ first baseman Glenn Davis, a power hitter called up to the major leagues a month before I was born in 1984. According to family lore, as a baby I would point

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to Davis as my favorite player, and when I was old enough to write, I sent him a letter asking him to be my best friend. Then disaster struck. In 1991, Houston traded Davis to the Baltimore Orioles. In retrospect, it was a smart deal; the Orioles gave up Steve Finley, Curt Schilling, and Pete Harnisch, all of whom went on to have more-thansolid careers. But my seven-yearold self was devastated. I briefly considered rooting for the Orioles, but it just wasn’t possible. Loyalty was the price you pay for having something to care about, I figured.

That’s why, for years, I was

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 67

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convinced that fantasy sports were ruining America. Fantasy sports involve an entirely different kind of fan experience. Interested parties create a league in which every member “drafts” players, drawn from the entire sport, to his or her own team. The league then uses individual players’ statistics from their actual games to determine whose teams win and lose. There are variations. In baseball, some league rules require members to change their lineup daily, others weekly. Some are limited to players in the National or American League. The strategies can vary depending on structure— different statistics can make or break you. In some leagues, participants put hours per week into managing their team; in others it’s hours per day.

Plenty of people who start with one baseball team soon wind up juggling teams in multiple leagues and across different sports. No matter how the league is structured, however, fantasy sports are about rooting for individual players. The teams that matter are the imaginary ones you’ve assembled.

The fantasy experience is based largely around drafting, the monitoring of stats, injuries, and trades (rumored and real), and figuring out which players might get benched. The bizarre result is that no one I know who’s a serious fantasy fan can sit and watch a damn game. Instead, they flip channels, watching one team until the pitcher changes, then a different player’s at bat on some other team. If they’re hard-core, an MLB.TV Pass lets them watch up to four games at once on any device.

The beauty of a single baseball game—the changing momentum and shifts in strategy, even the boredom when it starts to drag—gets lost.

Somewhere, so does some of the glory of being a fan. Not surprisingly, Matthew Berry, the senior director of fantasy sports at ESPN, disagrees. Berry, who started playing fantasy baseball in 1984, has made a life’s work out of his passion. In fact, he writes in Fantasy Life: The Outrageous, Uplifting, and Heartbreaking World of Fantasy Sports from the Guy Who’s Lived It, he thinks almost anyone who likes traditional sports should consider a career in fantasy.

BERRY MAKES A GOOD case for the

FANTASY LIFE: THE OUTRAGEOUS, UPLIFTING, AND HEARTBREAKING WORLD OF FANTASY SPORTS FROM THE GUY WHO’S LIVED IT

BY MATTHEW BERRY

Riverhead

community of fantasy fans. As he notes early on, 13 percent of Americans play fantasy sports, and the market is estimated at around $4.5 billion, mostly in advertising on TV and radio shows that dish out fantasy advice and on websites like Rotoworld, where fans can get updates throughout the day. There are even subscription services, like RotoWire, offering levels of insight others might miss. The community is 92 percent male and 91 percent white, with an average age of 36. Folks tend to be well educated, and by and large, fantasy players go to games at much higher rates and spend more on sports generally than average Americans.

America’s newest pastime has been around for decades. The journalist Daniel Okrent created the first fantasy baseball league in 1979, on a flight between Hartford, Connecticut, and Austin, Texas, where he was consulting for Texas Monthly. (The idea was partly suggested by one of Okrent’s professors at the University of Michigan, the film historian Robert Sklar, who had joined others in a pool to guess which players would win different statistical categories.) For fantasy’s first 20 years, in the days of faxes and landlines, trying to keep up with daily box scores and coordinate trades required a degree of knowledge and obsession that went far beyond catching games on the radio or in the park.

Yet if baseball has long fancied itself a metaphor for the American way of living, fantasy can now make a claim for the new century. “When you think about it,” writes Berry, “one of the beauties of fantasy is that it’s a microcosm of life.” Or of life as we’re coming to know it. In many ways, fantasy baseball is a more suitable pastime than plain old baseball for our 24-7-info self-branding world. Once it conquered baseball, fantasy soon spread to football, which has become the dominant fantasy genre, and then to basketball and international games like soccer and cricket; now there are fantasy leagues for curling and even for solo sports like golf.

Berry’s book picks up in the Internet age. A former Hollywood writer whose output included episodes of Married … with Children and the third Crocodile

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Dundee movie, he began writing a fantasy column more than a decade ago. He was a pioneer who set himself apart from sports media veterans with his funny asides, printing of hate mail, owning up to boneheaded trading mistakes, and a numbers-don’tlie, Nate Silver–meets-early-MTV-VJ attitude. Berry eventually became ESPN’s “senior fantasy analyst”—a job that mainly entails appearing on podcasts, TV reports, and Web columns to advise on just about every fantasy sport. He writes that he wanted to “get rid of the stereotype that fantasy’s a nerdy or a niche thing. We needed to make fantasy sports seem like it’s just one of those things people do.”

Berry makes sure to drop the names of celebrities who play—including Mad Men’s Jon Hamm, who once fell victim to his league’s bizarre rule that last year’s winner gets to bar one team in this year’s league from play. Paul Rudd played a character in Knocked Up whose wife thought he was having an affair only to discover the “other woman” was his fantasy team; the scene mimics the actor’s real-life addiction. The Hollywood Reporter once devoted a cover story to stars with their own teams.

“People” do fantasy, Berry says— but participation skews off the charts toward adult white men, and there’s a bro-ish machismo to a lot of fantasy culture. Getting by requires learning a dense insider’s lingo, and it’s hard to find a league that doesn’t engage in too much trash-talking for a child to play. Then there are frequently misogynistic attitudes, which can seem like a step back from the progress made in recent years in mainstream participatory sports.

Berry’s book relates oh-so-hilarious stories of a trade that included “dibs” on a hot waitress and a league teasing one of its members for hooking up with a man he thought was a woman.

For years, Berry’s followers have provided him with outlandish stories about their commitment, which he retells here with relish. There’s the guy who reschedules his daughter’s birthday around the fantasy draft.

There’s the guy who, after a hurricane, drained his parents’ generator to power a laptop to keep up with his players. “What proud parents they

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 69

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must be,” Berry quips. There’s the guy who makes a trade at a wedding ceremony while serving as best man and the guy who helped a repo man with his draft as the repo man was taking his car. There are leagues that require losers to get tattoos, and touching tales, like the league that keeps a spot for a deceased member while raising money for his daughter. Berry brings out how a game that’s highly individualistic is also extremely social, and socially networked. Players constantly e-mail, tweet, and reach out to their leagues on Facebook, sometimes for league business, other times to taunt, and somewhere in all that frequent contact, plenty of leagues undoubtedly become tight-knit. But that’s a distinct contrast from the broad lingua franca of the old team communities, where we imagine ourselves linked to those we don’t know by our shared passion for a team. There’s no fantasy equivalent to seeing someone wearing your team’s logo and saying hi.

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of fantasy in 2011, the year I started dating a Red Sox fan who also plays fantasy baseball. The Red Sox were headed into fall with a nine-game lead for the wild-card spot in the American League playoff. Then came September and the kind of spectacular meltdown—losing 18 of their final 24 games—that can leave a fan wandering the streets, muttering and crazyeyed. Lucky for me, my boyfriend had fantasy. His team was in contention, and he began rooting in particular for a rookie catcher for the Kansas City Royals named Salvador Perez. Focusing on what he could control, he found a way to remain invested in his sport despite the Red Sox tragedy. He was still trying to sneak his phone out at restaurants, to get the latest on his players from Rotoworld. His fantasy team ultimately came in second—but, as he always notes, just one point away from first. We’re now getting married, and I’ve accepted that I’ll spend years hearing about fantasy sports.

Part of me still wants to say that fantasy misses the point. It strips sports down to their most banal.

Instead of standing in awe at feats of athleticism, fantasy fans stress out

over players missing their statistical marks.

The chemistry that gels when players work together matters less when the focus becomes who gets credit for which plays. Bold and crazy managerial decisions, risky moves that may or may not pay off quickly become frustrating in a game that spotlights what’s quantifiable.

The Astros have made me sad many more times than they’ve made me happy—the last two seasons have reached historic lows—but I’ve always loved my connection to the team. The players on the screen can’t hear you rooting.

The GM doesn’t hear you screaming that the trade he’s considering is a terrible idea. Lord knows, the umps never hear you shout with words a family newspaper would refuse to print that they just made the dumbest call ever. At the heart of it, though, there’s this: Fans believe that our cheering means something, that somehow we have helped with the win or contributed to the loss. It’s a fantasy more powerful than any silly league.

The implications of fantasy sports are huge—and not just for those who play. Markets reward the most active participants. Fantasy is part of Marissa Mayer’s widely watched efforts to revive Yahoo, and leagues like the NFL have gone mobile in part to help those checking their phones for stats updates. But the rest of us feel it, too.

Baseball Prospectus was always a compendium of statistics and analysis, geared to a self-selecting audience, but its editors now largely assume their readers are using it for fantasy and provide columns and analysis specifically for fantasy players. During football season, ESPN now has an hour-long show on game days (often featuring Berry) devoted to fantasy. On networks, it’s common for the sports ticker at the bottom of the screen to include high fantasy scorers. Sports Illustrated, Fox, and CBS are all making

Matthew Berry

In many ways, fantasy baseball is a more suitable pastime than plain old baseball for our 24-7-info self-branding world.

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fantasy more visible, with the hopes more people will join the ranks of the addicted. On his blog, Berry has played around with fantasy versions of other parts of daily life: fantasy summer movie blockbusters, fantasy reality TV, even fantasy Thanksgiving (you lose points for getting sucked into shopping). It’s all fun and games, except we are moving further and further into a realm where things count to the extent they can be counted and even moments of leisure must be, somehow, hard-core. (According to Vanity Fair, Okrent, fantasy’s founding father, has switched to a lower-maintenance, “slo-pitch” version that lets you “lead your life like a semi-normal person.”)

As a child, I loved opening baseball cards, watching games at home, and, better yet, driving to a stadium. But my nostalgia is increasingly for a time when we had a middle ground about our passions—a commitment both deep and uncomplicated to a team that didn’t require constant tending.

Fantasy sports is just another arena of life in which we’ve given up a sustainable connection for something that seems to promise more rewards. The extra work may give a sense of results, of measurable accomplishment.

Whether our teams win or lose, we’re spared the risk of boredom—we have backup. But it’s hard to match the magic of old-school fandom.

Among the great team-driven moments in my life was a 2003 night when the Astros played the Yankees.

Of course the Yankees, with hundreds of millions in payroll, can snag whatever player they want—every good sports movie has an evil team, and that team is usually the Yankees. But on that night in 2003, while playing the Yankees, the Astros used six pitchers to serve up what’s normally an individual feat: a no-hitter. It was the first time the Yankees had seen a no-hitter since 1958. I watched the game with my mother and father in silence. We didn’t get up throughout the game, afraid that any change to our positioning might create a cosmic shift that could undo the moment. When the Astros finally won, we burst into cheers and hugs, beaming at one another. No one bothered to find out how the game would affect the pitchers’ statistics. 

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 71

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Alone in the USA George Packer’s chronicle of solitary Americans after the financial crash is nostalgic— but for what, exactly? BY MARK SCHMITT B

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n the quest to understand what has happened to the U.S. economy since the 2008 meltdown and the recession that followed, the challenge has been figuring out how far back to pull the lens. Early books on the crisis zoomed in on airless rooms occupied by panicked CEOs and government officials during the pathetic last few months of the Bush administration and the beginning of this one. More expansively reported accounts looked at lower-level traders and fly-by-night firms, expanding the scope to recognize a decade of mortgage fraud and exploitation of would-be homeowners and investors, along with the Washington corruption that allowed the profiteers to thrive unpunished.

As time passed, it became clearer that this was not a story that began in 2008 or just a story of the Bush years.

It was the inevitable last act of the period since the late 1970s, when the nation became dramatically wealthier but median wages stagnated, economic insecurity worsened, and debt became a means to paper over the consequences of inequality. That story is not only a political one. It involves global economic dislocation and a shifting of risk from corporations and government, which can handle it, onto individuals, who can’t. Sometimes as a result of economic challenges, sometimes independently, we’ve seen enormous changes in the nature of the family, in women’s lives at home and in the workplace, and in education, as a college credential has become almost indispensable while obtaining it has become harder. Technology has transformed the nature of community itself.

There’s probably only one example in all of American writing of how to encompass the full sweep of 30 years’ time—high and low; political, economic, and social—and that is the three novels that make up John Dos Passos’s U.S.A., which run from the

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Gilded Age before the turn of the 20th century, through the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, ending with Dos Passos’s well-known capitulation, “all right we are two nations.” Writing in the early 1930s, Dos Passos interspersed a narrative of 12 characters with snippets of headlines, newsreels, and lyrics; crisp pen portraits of public figures of the two nations, such as Eugene V. Debs and J.P. Morgan; and short “Camera Eye” segments that represented his own stream-of-­consciousness reactions to the era’s chaotic interplay of big money, economic hardship, radicalism, and backlash.

George Packer declares his debt to Dos Passos in his notes on sources and in the structure of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.

Packer is a New Yorker staff writer whose vocabulary has always been composed of juxtapositions. His 2000 book, Blood of the Liberals, appeared on the surface to be a family memoir.

Yet in the intersection of his father’s academic, urban Jewish family and the Alabama agrarian progressives on his mother’s side, he found a deeper story about American liberalism, not just as a political outlook but also as an identity, mostly tragic. The promising threads of the 1960s—multiracial coalitions of the poor in the South or the technocratic vision of good government—were by the end of that decade torn apart. Liberalism, in Packer’s powerful metaphor, had suffered a stroke.

In his latest book, Packer narrates the period from 1978 to early 2013 through juxtapositions of three individuals you probably haven’t heard of, along with accounts of two regions— Silicon Valley, which evolved from a cluster of quiet middle-class towns 30 years ago, and Tampa, where the recent boom-and-bust cycle reached its extremes. These are interspersed with pen portraits of better-known figures (Newt Gingrich, Oprah

THE UNWINDING: AN INNER HISTORY OF THE NEW AMERICA

BY GEORGE PACKER

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Winfrey, Robert Rubin, Alice Waters, Raymond Carver, Jay-Z) and periodic bursts of headlines, quotes, and lyrics.

The principal characters are all, like Packer, “of the generation born around 1960”—which is to say, they are a bit younger than baby boomers. None spent his or her adult life in the golden economy that rose up after World War II and came to an end sometime in the mid- to late 1970s. Yet each grew up surrounded by the outdated expectations of that economy and its politics.

Each also undergoes a particular form of radicalization: Packer describes it as “the radicalization of a conservative when the institutions he believed in have collapsed.”

Jeff Connaughton is an Alabaman who comes to Washington in the 1980s to devote himself to a hilariously unappreciative senator and then presidential candidate, Joe Biden. He does a stint in the Clinton White House, then becomes a lobbyist at Quinn Gillespie, a firm that pioneered the creation of apparent grassroots support for or opposition to legislation, before returning to the Hill as a crusader for financial reform, working for Biden’s appointed successor, Ted Kaufman.

Connaughton’s story of disillusion with Washington feels like the moral heart of the book, and Packer’s portrait of him, much of which appeared in The New Yorker and is recounted in Connaughton’s own book, The Payoff, is the most accurate and current account I’ve read of the culture of congressional staff and lobbying. Subtler than recent books by Lawrence Lessig or Robert Kaiser, it captures the way in which lobbyists broker not just money and access but political intelligence.

Once Connaughton is back on the Hill working for Kaufman, he finds that senators tell his former colleagues at Quinn Gillespie far more at weekly fundraising breakfasts about what they’re planning than they tell those on the inside.

Tammy Thomas, an African American from Youngstown, Ohio, exemplifies the familiar Rustbelt decline, stumbling through the consequences of the financial manipulations that led to the meltdown of first a steel company and later an auto-parts manufacturer. A mother of three, she

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Each of Packer’s characters is isolated, unattached: All we know about Connaughton’s personal life is that “he came close to marrying a couple of times” and that his primary loyalty, to Biden, is unreciprocated, while Thomas’s and Price’s relationships have sadder endings. Of an Indian-born minor character in the Tampa chapters, who gets some support from her family, Packer says, “Usha Patel was not a native-born American, which is to say, she wasn’t alone.”

The jacket copy insists that there are four main characters, the fourth being Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, later a hedge-fund investor, and the first outside investor in Facebook.

Thiel is an idiosyncratic libertarian, alternating between pessimism that all the possibilities for innovation and growth have been exhausted and enthusiasm about blue-sky inventions. But he is younger, semi-famous, and doesn’t appear until one-third of the way into the book in the “Silicon Valley” chapters. His arguments— which resemble those of the freemarket economist Tyler Cowen, who has written that the “low-hanging fruit” of economic growth have all been taken—are primarily focused on elites. His solution, supporting innovation, seems tangential to most of the stories in the book. To this reader, Thiel felt more like an oblique commenter on other aspects of the narrative, kind of like a Greek chorus. He’s the only one who has a theory of the 30-year unwinding, albeit a confusing and unconvincing one.

bet tmann corbis

TWO MAJOR POLITICAL eruptions

somehow manages to put her kids through college, then discovers her calling in community organizing in her forties. Thomas is a resilient and compelling figure, but the tropes of African American urban poverty are familiar, and Youngstown has been a cliché of industrial decline since before the 1970s.

The third main character is Dean Price, owner of a truck stop and fastfood restaurants in North Carolina,

John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy includes his famous capitulation: “all right we are two nations.”

and a devotee of Napoleon Hill’s 1930s self-help bible Think and Grow Rich. Price becomes a sudden convert to clean energy and biofuels. He attracts some attention from politicians, including the wholly admirable one-term Representative Tom Perriello of Virginia. But he cycles between modest business successes and big failures. He’s a bit too much of a serial screwup to fully earn the reader’s sympathy or interest.

have occurred in response to the economic transitions of the last three decades, both of them recent: the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street.

The first appears in the chapters on Tampa, where unzoned, careless development made it a hot spot for overblown and fraudulent real-estate transactions, followed by epidemic foreclosure. Yet by 2010, a consensus had begun to emerge around smarter development and investment in light rail, with support from conservative, establishment Republicans. Then the Tea Party came to town, warning that light rail and urban planning

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 73

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were the work of “Agenda 21,” a banal United Nations resolution from 1992 that Tea Partiers see as the first sign of world government. The initiative to fund light rail went down in the same election that brought Rick Scott to the Florida governor’s mansion; Scott rejected federal funding for high-speed rail between Tampa and Orlando. The characters in Tampa— more interesting than Packer’s central trio—include a reporter who broke the real-estate scams that drove up prices and led to disaster; the Republican officeholder who made the mistake of supporting light rail and responsible development; and a lawyer, formerly an active conservative, who became outraged about foreclosure fraud.

Sometimes our recent focus on “the 99 percent,” who have fallen behind the richest few in relative terms, blinds us to absolute poverty.

In Tampa, the Hartzell family offers the book’s most compelling profile of people with a “nearly complete lack of education or money or family or support of any kind, plus more than their share of health problems.” The moment Danny and Ronale Hartzell, thanks to Medicaid, finally get their neglected teeth replaced with dentures—but Ronale’s don’t fit, and Danny, “out of sympathy or inertia,” stops wearing his own new teeth though they fit perfectly—is as powerful as anything from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It is a reminder to technocratic liberals that every solution can run up against a reality in the lives of individuals and families that defies our smart designs.

Told through individual stories, Occupy Wall Street is portrayed as mostly an intense experience for those involved—in this case, a passionate young organizer and a slightly off-­ balance loner from Seattle. That may well be all there was to the movement.

One shortcoming of the leaderless, agenda-less experiential nature of the Occupy movement is that the attractive young, white college graduates in Zuccotti Park drew attention, including Packer’s, away from more focused organizing efforts involving those more directly affected by foreclosures and hardship. The protest campaign of a community-organizing network

called National People’s Action, for example, resulted in meetings with governors of the Federal Reserve around specific policy demands. Packer mentions, but only in passing, that one of the groups that came to Washington in 2010 as part of a large-scale NPA protest was the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative, including Tammy Thomas. In another chapter, Connaughton, working for Kaufman on a doomed reform amendment, calls up the public-­interest organization Americans for Financial Reform and asks, “Where are you guys?” Connaughton is demanding a presence to match the industry lobbyists at roughly the same moment that Thomas’s group has descended on Washington in dozens of old school buses. This moment in which two of The Unwinding’s characters almost intersect might have been more intriguing to explore than Occupy.

The Unwinding differs from U.S.A. in at least two ways. First, none of the characters, so far as I know, is fictional. Second, with the exception of Thiel and a few minor characters, they don’t get a lot of space to speak in their own voice. The author’s voice, the “Camera Eye,” is also missing, outside of the prologue and a few jarring interruptions. Most of the book, with the exception of some Dos Passos–­ inspired experiments with syntax in the short biographies, is composed in the most economical, detached New Yorker prose.

That leaves the reader to plumb the structure of the book to understand its direction or whether there even is one. Are the potted biographies trying to make a point? Packer identifies their subjects in the prologue as “household gods” from a generation older than the main characters, distracting us post-1960-ers with false promises. Almost all of them are boomers or older, and the first few profiles, of Newt and Oprah (household gods need only one name), fit his description. They are hucksters, tricking the post-“unwinding” rubes into believing that they are responsible for their own failures. (It seems to me snobbery to regard Winfrey in this light, but Packer makes clear that he does.) Colin Powell and

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Robert Rubin are profiled as “institution men,” for Rubin’s role in financial deregulation and Powell’s gullible backing of the Iraq War (a gullibility Packer shared, which he doesn’t mention). But what’s Raymond Carver doing in there? Jay-Z? The biggest question is, what did we “unwind” from? The book is steeped in nostalgia, but for what, exactly?

Thiel comes closest to explaining it, describing 1973 as “the last year of the fifties” and the period since then as— counterintuitively, to most readers—a “tech slowdown.” Thiel argues that the opportunities for wonder and rapid upward mobility have been lost to most people under the age of 60.

ben margot / ap images

NOSTALGIA IS NOW the dominant tone

in much of modern liberalism. Recalling the 1950s’ more secure, definedbenefit pensions, the narrower gap between average incomes and those at the top, and a political system that seemed to work better provides a reassurance that things could be different today. In its most familiar form, often found in this magazine and the recent work of, say, Paul Krugman, liberal nostalgia looks back to the levels of union density and labor negotiating power that built the middle class, but it explicitly tries to disaggregate the good 1950s from the bad, taking the economic data and leaving behind the era’s conformity and social, racial, and gender stratification. That’s not Packer’s thing. Labor unions have a minimal presence in this book, just as in Blood of the Liberals; Tammy Thomas was briefly involved in the union at her plant, but all she remembers is “watching a couple of white guys argue” and deciding the union wasn’t going to do much.

The nostalgia reflected in The Unwinding seems more complete. It doesn’t renounce the social stratification of the 1950s but treats it almost as a reassuring, lost norm. Consider where all his lonely characters end: Thomas revisits a house in which she’d lived for a short time as a child. The once grand home of one of the richest white women in Youngstown, for whom Thomas’s great-grandmother had been a live-in maid, it’s now occupied by the lonely widow of an

Packer’s four protagonists undergo “the radicalization of a conservative when the institutions he believed in have collapsed.”

Venture capitalist Peter Thiel alternates between pessimism that all the possibilities for innovation have been exhausted and enthusiasm about blue-sky inventions.

executive of the auto-parts company, its floors scratched dull by dogs, the neighborhood as run-down as the rest of the city. Despite the subservient relationship, the house represents a moment in Thomas’s life of freedom and ease. Connaughton moves back to the South, to Savannah, Georgia, where behind the dark magnolias and white mansions lies a life free of the manipulations and scams of Washington. Price makes plans to be buried in his family’s plot on a North Carolina tobacco farm.

Two recurrent themes in the book complicate the nostalgia: food and energy. Thiel declares food and energy the only two areas in which his hedge fund will not invest, because they’re “too regulated, too political” to produce gains. But many of the other characters are obsessed. Dean Price not only champions biofuels and in his last act tries to build a business based on converting discarded restaurant grease to fuel for school buses; he also builds a fresh-food market into one of his truck stops, after being disgusted by the fare served by the Bojangles’ Famous Chicken ’n Biscuits restaurants he owns. Before her move to community organizing, Thomas was involved in a program to develop small farms on vacant lots in Youngstown that would provide healthy local food to schoolchildren. (The campaign to better feed children is also where chef Alice Waters fits in.)

These, too, are nostalgic notes. The implication seems to be that if individuals and communities can get control of their own development and food, they can reconstruct the reassuring, stable communities of the 1950s, if not the prosperity that followed. Inverting Packer’s account of the radicalization of the conservative when institutions fail, this feels like a journey

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back, by way of radicalism, to a kind of old-fashioned conservatism. It’s a forgotten kind of conservatism, though, as skeptical of the disruptive force of the market and its cold and impersonal relationships as it is of government (much different from the Tea Party, which fears only government). One is reminded that Glass-Steagall, the 1933 banking law that Rubin and his allies reversed, and that Connaughton and Kaufman struggled to restore, was the work of two conservative Southerners, Carter Glass of Virginia and Henry Steagall of Alabama. That Jeffersonian impulse, which saw big banks and big market forces as encroachments on communities and families, now belongs to the left. It represents the sharpest challenge to the compromised liberalism of the Obama administration, with its wariness of challenging the financial sector. But is this enough of a foundation on which to build a forward-looking vision that can produce the kind of growth and security that was possible, for a brief time, in America? That’s a question beyond the scope of this narrative.

Of Dos Passos’s three books, the critic Malcolm Cowley wrote, “They give us an extraordinarily diversified picture of contemporary life, but they fail to include at least one side of it—the will to struggle ahead, the comradeship in struggle, the consciousness of new men and new forces continually rising.” The same point can be made about Packer’s solitary characters and their final sad returns to home. The only “new man” or woman at the end of the book, struggling forward, is Thiel. But his interests—radical life-extension technology and “seasteading” experiments to create small libertarian communities on artificial islands— are no less about isolation. “The future is so-so,” Thiel says, “but you can sort of navigate through it if you have a house with a gun and an electric fence and a college degree.” That’s not necessarily Packer’s message, but it’s the only message left, and as hard as it is to discern the ideal past that his characters are looking back toward, it’s even more difficult to see where they go from here. 

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 75

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The North Wing The Danish series Borgen is a huge hit in Europe.

Will its mixture of raw politics, social democratic ideals, and human frailties succeed in the U.S.? BY STEVE ERICKSON V

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rom Macbeth to I, Claudius, what makes political drama irresistible isn’t the collective but the intimate. Television writers understand what many historians don’t: Politics is the epic expression of humanity at its most private. Rack your brains, and you might recall that at the center of last winter’s House of Cards was a battle over education legislation; less forgettable are the unctuous and slithery monologues about congressional sway and supremacy by master manipulator Francis Underwood (Kevin Spacey).

The Danish series Borgen roils with policy skirmishes over an African civil war and the legal age of punishment for crimes by minors, but all of it is a stage for the transformation of Birgitte Nyborg, her nation’s first female prime minister. A voice of idealism at the outset, Nyborg struggles with the hard trade-offs of uniting a coalition of fractious parties. As she becomes cannier and more confident at governing, however, she loses her grip on a crumbling family—a daughter afflicted by anxiety attacks, a small son who wets his bed, a husband forced to pass up a once-ina-lifetime job offer because his wife is running a country.

The third and ostensibly final season of Borgen aired earlier this year in Denmark, and the first two seasons are now domestically available on DVD. If American enthusiasm hasn’t reached quite the pitch of the Borgenmania sweeping Europe—particularly in Great Britain, where the series recently won the British Academy of Film and Television Arts award for best international show—a cursory Google search reveals fans desperate to get their hands on episodes that haven’t even been translated yet.

As with a lot of cultural addictions, passion for Borgen (the “castle” in Copenhagen that houses the government) steamrolls any objections to its occasional clichés, especially those

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that involve secondary characters like the news anchor who’s at once the show’s designated hothead—more a lukewarmhead in Nordic climes—and its requisite hottie, not above sleeping with her sources. When a lover expires in her bed in the first episode, setting in motion the chain of events that makes Nyborg prime minister, it isn’t the last time the show resembles The West Wing, the Aaron Sorkin hit that kicked off its 1999 debut with a sexual dalliance between a presidential adviser and a prostitute. At the conclusion of Borgen’s second season, when Nyborg startles her opponents by calling for a new parliamentary election, the obvious model is The West Wing’s season-two finale, when rain-soaked President Jed Bartlet announces his candidacy for re-­ election in defiance of everyone’s judgment, or at least everyone who was on the show instead of watching it.

Readers of The American Prospect may expect that Borgen is an ideological Lost Horizon where, as we crawl from the Himalayan crash site that is the free market, we’ll glimpse Denmark’s social-democratic Shangri-la emerging from the mist. To be sure, even Nyborg’s most venal conservative foes, give or take a random xenophobe, are a step or two to the left of Barack Obama. One of the lessons that Nyborg learns with her new promotion, however, is how little respect reality has for principle; she reverses a long-held intention to withdraw Danish troops from Afghanistan. Apparently even in Scandinavian utopia, egos still churn, pettiness still abides, the squabble for influence still rages, and couples still don’t have enough time for sex. In the same way that Borgen displays how a progressive system remains marred by the untidy behavior of those living in it, the show is also an eye-opener for anyone with an exalted view of parliamentary

Even in Scandinavian utopia, egos still churn, pettiness still abides, the squabble for influence still rages, and couples still don’t have enough time for sex.

democracy, wistfully coveted by those frustrated with a presidential republic and how unresponsive it can be to all but the narrowest and most moneyed interests. As Borgen indicates, parliamentarianism can be shockingly unstable. While it’s true that an issue supported by 90 percent of the public might be less vulnerable to the dedicated assault of a fanatical lobby, Nyborg’s position remains so tenuous, the ground beneath her feet shifting so constantly, that she scarcely gets her footing at all. Many of Borgen’s initial episodes are preoccupied with the push-me-pull-you existentialism of whether Nyborg can

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form a government. Counseled every step of the way by a spin doctor just as cynical as any American version, she is as dependent on the alliances she breaks as on the alliances she makes; we come to realize soon enough that if Nyborg isn’t betraying someone— the Muslim leader of the Green Party or the former finance minister who’s been her mentor and most valued friend (and who has warned her she doesn’t have the luxury of friends)— she probably isn’t doing her job.

TV writers also know (if only because it makes for a better narrative) that there’s something to the “great man,” or “woman,” theory of

Marriage Council: Borgen’s Prime Minister Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and first husband Philip Christensen (Mikael Birkkjær)

history after all. While politics may be the social manifestation of individual pathology, that doesn’t mean there aren’t larger stakes to which only the charismatic man or woman can speak.

The difference between The West Wing and Borgen is the difference between the American Idea and the Danish Psyche; whereas Sorkin’s characters reflected the arrogance of a union forged from revolution and centuries-­ long clashes over ringing beliefs, Prime Minister Nyborg fights for national greatness in the face of a communal languor older than anyone alive. The Danish experience, and the identity born of it, is framed by indomitable

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Vikings at the beginning and, closer to the other end, an acquiescence to Hitler so hasty—Denmark’s resistance lasted two hours—as to make France look like the Alamo. We’re better than we know, Nyborg exhorts her countrymen, calling on them to “show the world what some crazy Danes can do” as they negotiate a truce in an African civil war the rest of the world wants no part of. Through sheer force of will, and overcoming the daunting sexism harbored by the males of even an enlightened society, Nyborg commands a personal respect more formidable than an office that is short on trappings or perks, with no “Hail to the Chief” played when she walks into the room and no 10 Downing Street (let alone 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue) to live in, and with reporters calling her by her first name at press conferences.

As Nyborg, Sidse Babett Knudsen is the best thing about the series, her portrait of command’s cost to both her and her country subtle and convincing. Sorting out when to be a leader and when to be a matriarch, jettisoning allies she values and retaining adversaries she despises, trying to resolve marital disputes at home by fiat as if she’s running a cabinet meeting, Knudsen is charming but direct, irritable but rarely explosive (in the first 20 episodes, she has a single furious outburst), as we watch her become tougher and more ruthlessly clear-eyed about the obligations of her destiny. If it’s not exactly the metamorphosis of Michael Corleone, there probably are times when Nyborg envies the options Michael has that she doesn’t, constrained by whatever better angels can be heard singing out beyond the aurora borealis. The second season left Nyborg triumphant, cheers ringing in her ears and editorialists opining, “Little Denmark finally has a prime minister it can be proud of!” but those American viewers frantic for new episodes may want to quit while their hero is ahead. The third season opens with Nyborg in exile, out of parliament, her loathsome right-wing predecessor back in power. A prisoner of her stature and haunted by her abdication, she still wrestles with the demons of ambition and the ambiguities of purpose, the song of the northern lights barely within earshot. 

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 77

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New Treasure in Maine The Colby College Museum of Art reopens, ready to share its $100 million gift and quietly bold vision. BY DEBORAH WEISGALL A

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One cold afternoon in May, glad I’d brought a down vest, I walked past ground crews raking seed into a swath of lawn surrounding a new building. A cube, five stories tall, the structure is sheathed in squares of dark glass: the Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion, a 26,000-square-foot addition to the Colby College Museum of Art, designed by the Los Angeles firm Frederick Fisher and Partners. A combination of galleries, storage space, offices, classrooms, and studios, the pavilion opens in July with an exhibition of works from the Lunder collection, which was given to Colby in 2007

by Paula and Peter Lunder; he is a 1956 graduate of the college.

The Lunder collection comprises 500 works of art, including major

The southeast façade of the Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion offers a view of Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #559.

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paintings by John Singer Sargent, George Inness, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, and James McNeill Whistler as well as an astonishing collection of Whistler’s etchings, watercolors, and pastels, together valued at more than $100 million. The pavilion, donated by the Lunders and their cousins the Alfond family, makes the museum the largest in Maine; the Lunders’ gift combined with the museum’s already superb collection of American and contemporary art turns Colby into arguably one of the finest college museums in the country.

Three blocks of COR-TEN steel, a sculpture by Richard Serra, are deployed on the terrace at the museum’s entrance. The red-brown glass sheathing echoes the patina of the steel. The sleek pavilion merges seamlessly with the existing museum and the scale of the campus. Its glass does not flash. It is not arrogant; it gleams with confidence—and with decorum, rare in our age of assertive museum architecture. It seems a piece of sculpture itself, Serra’s brutal masses

t r e n t b e l l p h o t o g r a p h y / t h e l e w i t t e s tat e / a r t i s t s r i g h t s s o c i e t y, n e w yo r k

olby College perches on Mayflower Hill at the western edge of Waterville, a tired post­ industrial city in central Maine. Brick classrooms and dorms, mostly nostalgic, neo-Georgian architecture, are ranged around curving roads.

Relatively new, the campus still feels like a work in progress. Colby is the northern­most school in the New England Small College Athletic Conference, a kind of scaled-down Ivy League. In contrast to Waterville, it is booming. It is increasingly selective but remains resolutely unpretentious, its mascot a white mule. In January the college can feel as isolated as the Arctic. It is an unlikely place to find an important museum, and few people know that Colby has one.

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magnified and hollowed out and rendered translucent.

Visible through the glass, an enormous striped drawing by Sol LeWitt fills one interior wall the height and width of the facade. As you approach the museum, those two signal statements of American minimalism— undulating bands of red, yellow, and blue, and a steel Stonehenge— announce its ambition. Turn in the other direction, and you see the view from Colby’s hill: east over the Kennebec River to the ridges that parallel the coastline about 50 miles away and north to Sugarloaf and Katahdin, the peaks of the Appalachians. That view is familiar, too. We’ve seen it often hanging on museum walls. Its expanse and sense of remoteness cannot have changed much since 1813, when Colby was chartered.

IN THE FIRST PART of the 19th cen-

tury, Fitz Henry Lane, Frederic Church, and Thomas Cole sailed along Maine’s coast and up its rivers, lured by the landscape and oblique northern light. They returned to New York, Boston, and Philadelphia with seductive paintings of sublime nature that

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Alex Katz’s 12-foot-long painting Canoe (1974) conveys a sense of contemporary isolation.

helped attract more settlers, then wealthy rusticators, and then more artists. Those pioneering artists were equally aware of the landscape’s economic potential: the resources of an accessible wilderness.

Waterville profited from the lumber of those forests and from mills powered by the Kennebec. Between 1810 and 1820, the town’s population grew to more than 1,300, and its inhabitants raised funds to establish the Maine Literary and Theological Institution.

The new college did not set out to educate rich gentlemen. Though Congregationalism was the official religion of Massachusetts (until 1820, Maine was part of that state), the Baptist church was expanding rapidly. Ministers were needed to serve working-class settlers and backcountry farmers who had come to try their luck in Maine’s cold climate. In 1833, students established the first abolitionist society based at an American college. In 1871, the same year Smith College was founded, Colby began admitting women. The 1813 charter stated that the school would not discriminate, and in the 1920s and 1930s, when many colleges established quotas limiting the number of

Jewish students, Colby, unlike other private colleges in Maine, did not.

For more than a century, Colby stood in the industrial center of town, next to the river and the shipyards and the factories—paper, heavy machinery, and textiles: the sources of Waterville’s prosperity until they started closing down in the 1980s.

Hemmed in by railroad tracks and warehouses, the college had nowhere to expand. In 1930, William H. Gannett, a publisher from Augusta, the state capital, offered to move the college there. But the citizens of Waterville rallied, and by 1931—at the height of the Great Depression—they had raised enough money to buy land on Mayflower Hill, where the college finally moved in 1952.

The new campus made it possible to think about a museum. In 1959, the college dedicated two rooms in a new music and art building to displaying gifts of American paintings and folk art. The museum has flourished much the way the college has: by paying attention to its community and by focusing on what it can do well. Hugh J. Gourley III, the museum’s second director, recruited in

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1966 from the Rhode Island School of Design, built the collection with a single-minded commitment.

For the most part, Gourley concentrated on American work, which was still largely undervalued. He sought quality, not famous names, and he never intended to replicate a survey course in art history. A courtly man, he befriended artists and collectors.

Many of his donors were local. Ellerton Jetté, whose Waterville company’s ads featuring a man in a dress shirt and a black eye patch made Hathaway shirts famous (until that factory finally closed in 2002), followed up his initial museum gift of folk art with a collection of American Impressionists. Willard Cummings, one of the founders of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture just up the Kennebec River, which brought to Maine artists making their reputations in New York, donated his collection of watercolors and drawings and introduced Colby to a new generation of artists with a Maine connection.

Artists had never stopped coming to Maine to work and sometimes to live. In 1883, Winslow Homer settled in Prouts Neck, on the coast just south of Portland. Turning his back on the fancy summer colony his family was developing on that rocky headland, he looked out to sea and painted implacable wind and water, metaphors for the diminished importance of human beings in a Darwinian world.

John Marin first came to Maine in 1914 and later spent summers on Cape Split, producing work whose exhilarating tension arises from his instinct both to abstract and to record what he saw. Childe Hassam, Frank Benson, George Bellows, Robert Henri, and Rockwell Kent took summer refuge on Maine’s idyllic islands.

After World War II, artists kept coming, often to schools like Skowhegan; its alumni and faculty include Ellsworth Kelly, Alex Katz, and Louise Nevelson, who was born in Russia but grew up in Rockland. Of the 30 artists represented in a contemporary gallery of the Lunder collection, 13 have ties to Skowhegan. In our wired era, artists like the photorealist Richard Estes, who lives on Mount Desert Island, have been able to keep a base

Curators have assembled the collection itself into a work of art that disturbs and moves and over and over again surprises us.

in Maine year-round while maintaining international careers.

Gourley began a long friendship with Alex Katz, who had bought a house in Maine in 1956 and whose intimate views of his inland landscape, bordering on abstraction, helped shift ideas of what could be monumental in art. In 1992, Katz gave 400 works to the museum; later he added another 400 prints, drawings, paintings, and cutouts. Norma Marin donated a large group of works by her late husband John Marin and has promised the museum her collection of American modernist photographs; the museum has also been promised an archive of prints and drawings

by Richard Serra. In addition, Katz, through his foundation, began buying art for the museum, and the collaboration has continued under the present director, Sharon Corwin. Katz’s gifts range from the work of emerging artists to paintings by Marsden Hartley (born down the river in Lewiston), Adolf Gottlieb, Chuck Close, and Jennifer Bartlett.

In 1999, Paula and Peter Lunder funded a wing to provide exhibition space for the museum’s burgeoning American collection. Their interest in art began, Paula Lunder told me in a

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phone conversation, when they first moved to Waterville and for something to do on Sunday afternoons began driving around to antique shops. Paula Lunder had grown up in Chicago, her husband in Boston; in 1959 Peter Lunder came to Maine and joined his cousins and his uncle Harold Alfond, who had married Dorothy Levine, a girl from Waterville, and, after selling his first shoe business, had bought an abandoned factory and started what would become the Dexter Shoe Company.

In 1993, the family sold Dexter Shoe to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway for stock. The deal turned out to be one of the few that lost Buffett money: In 2002, Dexter shut down, but the family’s stock has appreciated, and at the time of Alfond’s death in 2007 it was worth more than $3 billion. The Alfonds have shared some of this windfall with central Maine, whose counties, among the poorest north of the Mason-Dixon Line, have been unable to reinvent their economy after the flight of manufacturing. In addition to donating athletic facilities and dormitory buildings to Colby as well as to other Maine colleges, the Alfonds have helped to build an innovative cancer care center

Museum director Sharon Corwin in a gallery in the new pavilion

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 81

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in Augusta and donated a community center to Waterville. Shortly after Harold Alfond’s death in 2007, his foundation announced an initiative that gives $500 to every baby born in Maine: seed money for a college fund.

LOYALTY TO COLBY played a big part

Aimee Teegarden wants to save the treasures below the surf.

Our ocean’s hidden treasures, the nurseries and homes of life in the ocean, are in trouble. Scientists say they need to be protected. Please help.

Go to oceana.org/hiddentreasures or Text OCEAN to 50555 to donate $10.

Aimee Teegarden surfs and free dives in La Jolla Cove and Santa Barbara Island, CA

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82 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG JUL /AUG 2013

in the Lunders’ decision to give their art to the museum, but Paula Lunder was quick to add that a major institution might have put much of the collection in storage. Here it will be seen and enjoyed. The Lunders have stated that their collection is a gift to the people of Maine, not only to the college. Admission to the museum is free and will stay that way. The Lunders are homey people, and comfortable red lounge chairs are clustered in the entrance hall of the new pavilion.

Corwin met me there, that bright May afternoon. She plugged in a sculpture by Dan Flavin that glowed neon pink on the wall, and we waited as a Jenny Holzer across the room booted up to spill its LED cascade of morphing truisms and truths. Corwin walked with me through the galleries, which were closed for reinstallation.

Leisure is one of the perks of being an academic museum. So is freedom from constraints. “We don’t have to worry about gate,” Corwin says.

The museum’s holdings make no attempt to be comprehensive. “We arranged the galleries by theme,” Corwin explained. They have also arranged the galleries to ask

questions. An Alex Katz painting—12 feet long, of a birch-bark canoe against vivid lake blue—hangs near Claes Oldenburg’s giant eraser with its spiky Mohawk and opposite a crushed-car sculpture by John Chamberlain; facing them hangs a small, bleak view of Penobscot Bay by Fairfield Porter. These works were made in the 1970s, though at first glance, it seems like the Porter could have been painted a century earlier. There are correspondences: objects blown up beyond ordinariness or squashed into violent abstraction. Katz’s canoe and Porter’s ocean share a contemporary isolation, an expression of absence.

And Maya Lin’s 2008 Pin RiverKissimmee, assembled with hundreds of pushpins—has she responded to ideas of both the transformation of materials and the poignancy of delicate observation?

The collection is intimate, and many of these works have hung on the Lunders’ walls. A small Sargent oil, Study of Three Figures, shows two naked boys, one about 12 and the other 5, as sensuous as any Venus and Cupid; the clothed woman in the background hovers like a chaperone.

Beside the oil hangs a sketch Sargent made of that same dark-haired adolescent from behind. Visible through a doorway is a haunting double portrait by Thomas Wilmer Dewing, often dismissed as sentimental and decorative. Two women, separated by the painted line of a sapling, seem

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Opposite page: Monhegan, Maine (1950) by Rockwell Kent; Clockwise from top: The Song (1892) by Thomas Wilmer Dewing; Whistler with His Friend Mrs. Patterson (1882) by James McNeill Whistler; Study of Three Figures (1878–1879) by John Singer Sargent.

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to be submerged in a green lawn.

One sits on a bench, the other holds a lyre, like a muse. The seated woman is Dewing’s wife, Marie, an accomplished painter herself; the other is his mistress.

In the gallery called “Views from Abroad,” there is a glorious panorama of Venice by Thomas Moran that channels J.M.W. Turner. Sunshine spills into the lagoon like fireworks.

Later, Moran took his fascination with light west with him on the great U.S. Geological Survey and helped convince Congress with his paintings of Yellowstone and Yosemite to preserve their subjects as national parks.

In “Multiple Modernisms,” three sculptures by Elie Nadelman ground a cacophony of pattern and figures: familiar images by Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keeffe, a patchwork Maurice Prendergast promenade, a wild and crazy Thomas Hart Benton hoedown, an early oil by Edward Steichen as blue as a photographic cyanotype, a scared and sullen boy

by Robert Henri. In a gallery devoted to rivers and the ocean, a tugboat by Rockwell Kent steams down the Hudson, its smoke a juicy swirl of white painted before he found his own austere voice. Then look at some Whistlers—Chelsea in Ice veils the Thames in virtuosic whites, and Marine: Blue and Grey, painted almost 30 years later, simplifies harmonies of color from the sea and sky.

This kind of installation, in terms of mixed-up timelines and intuitive juxtapositions, is not feasible for most museums. It is idiosyncratic and took months to achieve. Corwin and the museum’s curators have assembled the collection itself into a work of art that disturbs and moves and over and over again surprises us.

Outside the museum, students walked around in shorts and flip-flops, willing the weather to be warm. Trees were beginning to leaf, and the hills shimmered in shades of green. You could see the season shifting toward summer. The Colby Museum of Art offers a changing view, too. It gives us new ways to think about how America’s past and present are reflected in art; it reminds us how much a museum can achieve and how much it can give. 

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If Pot Becomes Legal What will become of its secretive California hometown? BY JAMELLE BOUIE B

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t one point in Humboldt: Life on America’s Marijuana Frontier, Emily Brady’s account of her year in a remote Northern California county where pot is the cash crop that drives the local economy, one of the book’s subjects—a native of the area named Emma Worldpeace—talks to a new friend about the pictures of deceased classmates that hang on tackboard on Emma’s dorm room wall.

“Did you know all these people who died?” she asked.

“Yeah, I grew up with all of them,” Emma replied.

“Oh my god, that seems so tragic.”

The kicker was that Emma’s friend was the one who came from a “rough part of the Bay Area.” “Well sure, maybe every year someone from my school died,” her friend said. “But I went to high school with five or six thousand people.” In a large city, the fallout from youth violence represents an awful loss. In Humboldt, population 135,000, its frequency is something of a catastrophe. Emma is driven to ask why, and in her final year at the University of California, Berkley, she devotes her time to answering that question as part of a senior project.

“Her findings stunned the community,” Brady writes. Over a ten-year period in Humboldt, 36 youths met “violent or untimely deaths.” The percentage of 11th-graders who recently binge drank was twice the state average, and—unsurprisingly—the number of students who had recently smoked pot was even higher.

This research doesn’t get much time in Brady’s trim book. Still, it’s worth commenting on. When we think of marijuana, we don’t usually think of violence. We think of the opposite: goofing around, eating too much food. We might think of Cheech and Chong, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, Harold

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and Kumar, that time James Franco co-hosted the Academy Awards. This perception—that pot is harmless, even fun—has helped drive a broad, recent shift in American public opinion toward marijuana legalization. Likewise, a growing awareness of pot’s benefits, from alleviating the pain of chemotherapy to helping to treat conditions like glaucoma, has made Americans more receptive to the drug.

Overall, according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center, 52 percent of Americans support legalization, up from 32 percent ten years ago.

Californians legalized marijuana for medicinal purposes in 1996 and approved small-scale decriminalization in 2010. For non-medicinal use, marijuana is still illegal to buy and sell, but if you’re stopped with a small quantity—less than one ounce—the police will let you off with an infraction, comparable to a traffic ticket. In 2010, Californians voted on Proposition 19, which would have fully legalized the cultivation and sale of marijuana. Its failure was a relief to growers, who would have seen large price drops—more than 75 percent— if weed had been legalized. For now, Humboldt continues in its unusual, secretive, sometimes violent gray zone of quasi-legality. Living inside that gray zone is the subject of Brady’s humane book. modern Humboldt— that is, the history of its white residents—begins in the middle of the 19th century, with settlers who saw the area’s seaport as a way to move supplies from San Francisco to gold mines farther inland in California. Its population exploded with the discovery of redwoods in the 1880s, then declined as the National Park Service gradually put an end to rampant logging. Economic vitality drained away until the 1960s, when a new influx of residents— hippies—picked Humboldt as the place THE HISTORY OF

HUMBOLDT: LIFE ON AMERICA’S MARIJUANA FRONTIER

BY EMILY BRADY

Grand Central Publishing

where they would get off the grid. The widespread cultivation of marijuana in Humboldt began soon after the arrival of seedless pot. Once Mexico’s government (with American help) cracked down on marijuana cultivation within its own borders, the market boomed.

By 1979, Brady writes, an estimated 35 percent of all weed consumed in the United States came from California.

In Humboldt, hippies and former loggers both entered the game, followed by enterprising migrants and others looking for a (relatively) quick buck.

With care and skill, large cultivators could grow huge amounts of marijuana, which would be sold—across the country—at rates of more than $2,000 a pound. Everyone in Humboldt acknowledges to Brady the serious economic dangers the town could face with future legalization, even if much of the evidence she gathers argues for going that route. The institutions of Humboldt—the radio station, the community center—were built with help from cannabis. “Marijuana farming had become a way of life, one that transcended class and generations,” Brady writes. There are hemp festivals and marijuana fairs. Successful farmers show their gratitude by tithing to local charities. In the isolation of the mountains and forests—where gravel roads make transportation difficult— growers generally run generators and keep to themselves.

Brady organizes her book around four people: An “old-timer,” Mare, who has been growing since 1980; a newcomer, Crockett, raised in a different California town shaped by pot and recently arrived in Humboldt to manage a marijuana farm; the young student Emma; and the sheriff’s deputy, Bob Hamilton.

Bob makes an especially interesting subject. A tall and broad man of about 50, he grew up in Humboldt County in its largest city, Eureka. His childhood wasn’t easy—his father tried to kill his mother but she survived, only to die four years later in a fire. He spent his teenage years in Southern California, served in the Air Force, worked as a cop in Fresno, and then moved back to Humboldt after retiring. He wasn’t a fan of the drugs. But he loved the area, and he worked hard to mitigate

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the various harms that come with so many residents earning an income off of an illegal product. “Behind every beautiful vista,” Brady writes, “Bob now saw dope, and meth, and what he called the ‘junkyard lifestyle,’ of those living on the edge.” In 2012, the Humboldt Sheriff’s Office analyzed the last eight years of data on homicides in the county. The large majority of the 38 murders committed in that period were drug-related. That said, Bob has all but given up on the idea that you can stop marijuana or any drug use.

At most, you can control it. “The way he saw it,” Brady writes, “as long as there was a black market somewhere, the issues of criminality associated with the marijuana industry would continue. The only way it was ever going to change was to legalize it.”

The story of Bob and his vigilance makes for a strong contrast with that of Crockett, who spends days and nights guarding his marijuana crop from various authorities. The fear of law enforcement that consumes growers,

the violence, the theft—maybe all this would end if we legalized marijuana and brought the drug out of the shadows. Indeed, one possible factor for the growing public support for legalization is the assumption that, all things equal, legal pot would create a healthier, safer environment than the alternative. At least trade would be managed by merchants and retail clerks, not criminals.

But then there’s Emma’s experience. Too many of her classmates have died as a result of Humboldt’s culture of, in Brady’s words, a “world without boundaries,” in which teenagers, in their desire to push against something, “fall over the edge.” Through Emma’s story, Brady throws a little water on the idea that legalization is an easy solution. While there’s little doubt that legal pot would lead to less violence, it’s also true that legalized marijuana means easier access to the drug.

As with any drug, there are risks.

Social scientists and other researchers have documented a variety of ills, from dependence (distinct from addiction)

It’s hard to draw policy conclusions from Humboldt’s unusual gray zone of quasi-legality.

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and respiratory problems to impaired mental health, adverse educational and employment outcomes, a greater likelihood of other drug use, and the fallout from intoxication.

A place like Humboldt is sui generis. There’s no way to draw broad conclusions about how marijuana legalization—or quasi-legalization— would play out when your initial sample includes a place where public services are funded by drug sales.

But the stories that come out of the county—a 20-year-old who was killed after a deal went wrong, or the preteens who get together to smoke weed—remind us that every choice we make has a cost.

Legalization advocates do their argument a disservice when they pretend marijuana is harmless. They do the same when they insist that legalization will lead to a dramatic demobilization in the war on drugs. Susan Sarandon isn’t a policy thinker, but she gets to the core of that argument when she calls it “a waste of our money

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 85

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to incarcerate all those people” over marijuana. It is. But the number of people incarcerated and the amount of money wasted aren’t as great as you think. As criminologist Mark A.R. Kleiman—who is leading Washington state’s legalization effort—writes in a recent issue of Democracy, “The 500,000 people behind bars at any one time for drug-law violations constitute only about 20 percent of those locked up.” Marijuana accounts for just a chunk of that 20 percent, not the majority of our prison debacle.

None of this is to say we shouldn’t rethink our approach to the drug.

Indeed, none of it is to say pot shouldn’t be legalized. Marijuana’s harms are still arguably less severe than the harms associated with alcohol or some prescription drugs. Starting last year, Colorado and Washington have moved forward with an experiment in legalization, to see if it’s possible to turn pot into a regulated product like alcohol, tobacco, and other substances. If these state initiatives can escape federal intervention—the Obama Department of Justice has so far not been lenient on this front—they’ll provide valuable data on the costs and benefits of legalization, helping us to draw conclusions about whether national legalization would be a policy worth pursuing.

As a place and as a book, Humboldt is too idiosyncratic to add to that conversation. But in illustrating potential dangers of legalization alongside the terrible costs of prohibition, it helps us see that we do have to make a choice.

Putting pot in a gray area—where it’s neither legal nor prohibited—gives us the worst of legalization and illegality.

Brady, for her part, comes down on the side of bringing weed into the light. “While I lived in the community, I straddled the role of outsider and insider. … I also made wonderful friends with people who, of course, grew pot. I saw how this income enabled them to pursue their dreams, but I still believe their economy is built upon something that is wrong, not marijuana itself, but the fact that it is illegal. Like Mare, Emma, and Bob, and most of the people I became friends with, I am for the full legalization and regulation of marijuana.” 

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James Agee at Harvard

Agee, Before He Was Famous Can a rediscovered first draft of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men speak more directly to our time than the finished masterpiece? BY JOHN LINGAN B

B COTTON TENANTS: THREE FAMILIES

BY JAMES AGEE

Melville House

O O

y age 26, James Agee had spent four years at Fortune, the glossy magazine created by Henry Luce to celebrate the American business class, filing un-bylined reportage on topics like orchid cultivation and cockfighting and the occasional skeptical item on how the new Tennessee Valley Authority was playing out. Most writers would consider it a plum job, especially in the early 1930s. But Agee, politically progressive and instinctively adversarial, was uneasy over the magazine’s thrall to the lavish life. He had ambitions worthy of a Blake or a Dostoevsky: highly personal, mythic literature meant to get “as near truth and

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whole truth as is humanly possible,” as he put it in a letter in early 1936.

A few months later, Agee got an assignment that spoke to his ideals.

As part of Fortune’s “Life and Circumstances” series, he was to travel to Southern cotton country and live among poor working families. Agee had grown up in Knoxville, Tennessee, and he descended from Southern Appalachian farmers on his father’s side. But he’d spent years up North studying at Exeter and Harvard and living in Manhattan and was eager to scrub off some of his discomfiting Yankee privilege. Impassioned and naive, Agee and Walker Evans, the

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 87

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It is becoming more and more obvious

to many that the present economic structure of the world is in tatters and must be changed. For example, the economies of the USA, Europe and Japan are in the doldrums; and China, so recently the powerhouse, is slowing down. Only India, where millions still live and die in poverty, and Brazil hold aloft the banner of ‘success’.

Admittedly, this is a very partial view of the economies of the world but it is largely the case that the nations are languishing and know not how to prosper. The old tricks no longer work: university graduates feel lucky to serve in bars; the poor are poorer than ever and are thankful for food banks; the middle classes struggle to ‘keep up’; the rich are richer than ever but believe they are over-taxed.

Governments try, but their priorities are mistaken and their methods no longer are relevant to the problems which face the world. The people, however, who suffer most from government inaction or wrong thinking, see clearly their own needs. They look for freedom, justice, the right to work and a world at peace in which their families can thrive. Their demands are more and more being given voice. For little longer will the mass of men* restrain the anger and

frustration which is their lot. They trust no longer the words or the actions of governments done in their name. For too long, and too often, they have been deceived and cheated of their birthright. They see this in simple terms but with clear eyes, trusting no longer the machinations of the powerful rich.

The voice of the people is rising, nay, has risen, and is calling men to declare themselves.

The people, clear-eyed and unafraid, have looked into the future and have seen the possibility of the fulfilment of their aspirations for a just and peaceful world.

They know that this will not happen by itself but that they must, together with their brothers and sisters, take the power of fulfilment into their own hands. They know too that the way may be hard and dangerous but that the prize is too precious for them to fail, for it is the prize of brotherhood, of justice and peace, and a better, simpler and truer life for all. They know that no sacrifice is too great for this achievement and are willing to die in its name.

Thus will the people of the world inherit the birthright of freedom and justice that is their due. Thus will the voice of the people rise louder and clearer in the months and years ahead. t t t

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The Masters, headed by Maitreya, the World Teacher, are highly advanced teachers and advisors of humanity who are planning to work openly in the world very soon. *The word “men” is used as a general term meaning humankind.

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The people’s voice heralds the future

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Farm Security Administration photographer he recruited to join him, arrived in the Cotton Belt with little idea of what sharecropping entailed or where the farmers might be found.

The pair stumbled upon a tenant farmer named Frank Tingle in Sprott, Alabama, and never bothered to correct his impression that they were government employees in the area to help.

They went with Tingle and his two neighbors, Floyd Burroughs and Bud Fields, back to the wood-board shacks where the men lived with their wives and children, in varying states just shy of servitude. Soon they all reached an agreement whereby the artistic city boys would pay for the chance to observe the farmers’ routines.

The experience was eventually documented in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) one of the unclassifiable masterpieces of American literature and a work of profound, even exhausting, moral intensity. But that book didn’t appear until five years after Fortune killed Agee’s initial article, the text of which was presumed lost for decades, until researchers at the University of Tennessee identified the manuscript among papers donated by the Agee family in 2003.

The original article has now been co-published as Cotton Tenants: Three Families by the indie outfit Melville House and lefty provocateurs at The Baffler. In his introduction, novelist Adam Haslett argues correctly that Agee’s poetic and political impulses are better balanced in Cotton Tenants than in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; in the book, Walker Evans’s naturalistic photographs ground Agee’s lofty prose, but in the article the two share a journalistic purpose. Cotton Tenants certainly contains examples of Agee’s textured, semi-surreal language—like a description of one father picking cotton “in sunlight that stands on you with the serene weight of deep seawater, and in heat that makes your jointed and muscled and finestructured body flow like one indiscriminate oil.” But the new book is more approachable than its impressionistic cousin, short and spare where Famous Men is sweeping and diffuse. Agee’s journalism for hire is usually diminished as a footnote to his influential and charmingly

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personal film criticism, his screenplays for The African Queen and Night of the Hunter, and his posthumously Pulitzer-­ winning novel A Death in the Family— to say nothing of Famous Men’s high regard among later generations of nonfiction writers. But Cotton Tenants shows he could be plenty expressive on assignment, and this book belongs among his highest achievements.

AGEE HELPED SPORADICALLY with the

farming, but we know from Famous Men’s diaristic passages that he saved more of his energy for nightfall, writing while the family slept on verminous mattresses that were “such a crime against sex and the need of rest as no sadistic genius could much improve on.” Beyond its depictions of economic helplessness, Famous Men unsettles precisely because it conjures the image of a comfortable aesthete wringing inspiration from the plight with which he claims to sympathize. Agee’s solution was to be as overzealous with empathy as he was with his prose.

The surprise of Cotton Tenants, then, is its straightforwardness. The book is divided into nine thematic chapters such as “Work,” “Business,” and “Clothing,” with Evans’s photographs, some never before published, interspersed throughout the text rather than sequestered up front as they were in Famous Men. Sharecropping (living on and working someone else’s land, paying rent and a portion of the harvest) and tenant farming (a system in which you had the luxury of owning maybe a mule, a few tools, and some seeds) had been standard Southern practice since the antebellum era. By the 1930s, fewer whites were subject to sharecropping’s lopsided arrangements than blacks, the sons and grandsons of freedmen.

Agee and Evans stayed only with white farmers, though Cotton Tenants, unlike Famous Men, contains an appendix detailing the “Negro” sharecropping experience, which was even more exploitative, dangerous, and desperate than the white version. Either way, each year starts with the family in debt, and only a good crop will come close to getting them out. If weather doesn’t cooperate or if injury strikes parent or child—all children work,

Dignity Despite Material Lack: Agee grants hygiene the same attention as farming.

basically from the time they can walk— better luck next year. The families are “free” in the technical sense that they aren’t owned as property. But “very few tenants keep books,” Agee writes, and, Of those who do, still fewer are so foolish as to bring them up for comparison with the landlord’s.

It is not only that no landlord, nor influential citizen, nor any court of law, would give his accounting any credit against his landlord’s.

It is, more importantly, that any

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questioning of the landlord’s word would create an extremely unfavorable impression. Such a tenant would not be the type of willing worker a landlord would care to keep on his place.

The Burroughs family, sharecroppers with whom Agee spent the majority of his Alabama stay, are a particularly dire case. Thanks to a childhood hand injury, Floyd Burroughs can pick only 150 pounds of cotton a day, a little over half the average for a grown man.

His wife is the primary breadwinner, earning them their monotonous and malnourishing diet of sorghum, lard, corn, and bitter, grainy coffee. Of the even worse-fed Tingle family, Agee writes: Outside of an occasional chicken, a dependable part of whose diet has been human excrement, there is never any meat except pork, and never any pork except salt pork, and never more than a dab of that at a time, and often not even a dab.

Early in the book, Agee states that it’s his intention to focus on the small aspects of poverty rather than the most sorrowful tales of woe. “If the life of the tenant,” he writes, “is as bad as it has been painted—and it is worse—it will show its evil less keenly, essentially and comprehensively in the fate of the worst-treated than in that steady dripping of daily detail which effaces the lives even of the relatively ‘well’ treated.” So he grants hygiene the same attention as farming: Saturday morning if there is time, and if not, then certainly on Sunday, Burroughs shaves. When he is unemployed he shaves twice a week. His equipment is a broken­ handled mug with rosebuds wreathing it, a sliver of toilet soap, a rundown tencent varnish brush, a straight razor, a strop

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Artistic city boys Agee and Walker Evans paid the Tingle, Burroughs, and Fields families for the chance to observe the farmers’ routines. Clockwise from top: a house in Hale County, Floyd Burroughs, Bud Fields.

Opposite page: Allie Mae Burroughs doing the wash.

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made of an old belt, and a clear cheap mirror on a wire frame.

If this sounds like itemizing, the cumulative effect is close to profound.

In a consumer society, dignity rests on one’s ability to consume, and Agee wanted his audience—Fortune’s audience—to see how much dignity an American could summon in the face of material lack.

That shaving description appears in Famous Men, minimally altered but surrounded by endless other domestic litanies. The later book is an encyclopedia of tactile and emotional experiences, an “exhaustive … reproduction and analysis of personal experience, including the phrases and problems of writing and communication,” according to Agee’s notes of the time. It is certainly about the poor, and powerfully so, but mostly it’s about James Agee.

Hard to blame him. The four and a half years during which Cotton Tenants ballooned into Famous Men were chaotic even by his restless standards.

He quit Fortune—to focus on poetry and fiction, the evidence suggests, not because the unwieldy manuscript for Cotton Tenants never made it

Cotton Tenants seems well suited to our current political and literary culture— a model for advocacy reporting.

into print. He ended his joyless first marriage and began his torrid second; moved to then-rural Frenchtown, New Jersey; began experiencing hallucinatory visions from stress; facilitated a sexual relationship between Evans and his new wife, nearly suffering a nervous breakdown after watching them in bed together; took a job as a book reviewer for Time; became a father; and ended his second marriage. In the midst of all that, he turned 30 and graduated from overactive drinker to genuine alcoholic.

The sharecropper story was the constant in Agee’s life for this agonizing period. When he was feeling overwhelmed, he clung to memories of the trip and his literary designs for describing it, though as he became further removed, his subject changed from the families to his recollections. In the book, he states his ambition to tell the reader, “at all leisure, and in all detail, whatever there is to tell: of where I am, of what I perceive.”

Given that Famous Men is closer to an experimental memoir than most journalism published before or since (“I am not at all trying to lay out a thesis, far less to substantiate or to solve.

I do not consider myself qualified,” he announces more than halfway through), its overlay of righteous fervor often feels wearing, even manipulative. On a purely literary level, this hardly matters; Famous Men’s combination of stylistic brio and personal fury is what makes it unique in American literature. It’s a stylistic astonishment, just not so useful as a document of the Great Depression. Over the decades, multiple writers have revisited the Alabama setting and talked to the farmers’ descendants. Ambivalence reigns; family members remain proud but protective of their relatives’ unglamorous place in literary and photographic history.

Author William T. Vollmann summarized the book’s contradictions when he described it as “an elitist expression of egalitarian longings … despite its fierce intellectualism it is essentially an outcry of childlike love, the love which impels a child to embrace a stranger’s legs.”

Perhaps because of this conflicted

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tone, it took decades for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to find its audience.

It was initially published just months before America entered World War II. The daily news was more transfixing than Agee’s operatic depiction of peasants, especially since the South was starting to ramp up industrial production. The landowner class was becoming a factory-owner class, and Agee’s book was on its way to being history before it had a chance to be journalism.

Agee’s death in 1955, when he was 45, prompted a renewed cult of interest in his work. A 1960 reissue gave Famous Men the reputation of an unknown classic, and by decade’s end the book was considered a forerunner to the New Journalism movement, which borrowed Agee’s loquacious reporter’s voice and unabashedly personal relationship to his topic.

Agee’s prequel seems just as well suited to our current political and literary culture—a model for scene-driven advocacy reporting at a time that brims with examples, from West, Texas, to Bangladesh, of human life subjugated to economic profit. When Agee does preview the higher rhetorical register that would take over in Famous Men, it feels deserved and appropriate since his images are otherwise allowed to speak for themselves: A civilization which for any reason puts a human life at a disadvantage; or a civilization which can exist only by putting human life at a disadvantage; is worthy neither of the name nor of continuance. … And a human being whose life is nurtured in an advantage which has accrued from the disadvantage of other human beings, and who prefers that this should remain as it is, is a human being by definition only, having much more in common with the bedbug, the tapeworm, the cancer, and the scavengers of the deep sea.

It won’t approach Famous Men’s literary influence, but Cotton Tenants stands as James Agee’s more powerful depiction of poverty and the moral lapse that perpetuates it. We can’t have too many artful reminders of this failure, and few are as artful as this. 

JUL /AUG 2013 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 91

comment

Early and Often

BY ABBY RAPOPORT

I

n-person early voting, perhaps the most significant election reform in recent decades, was no liberal innovation. Instead, it was lawmakers in conservative Texas who, in 1985, proposed that voters be allowed to cast ballots before Election Day. The initiative wasn’t controversial, let alone partisan; when it passed both houses by overwhelming margins, newspapers barely considered the bill news. The idea was to make voting easier and, some hoped, increase turnout among those with inflexible work and child-care schedules who have trouble making it to the polls on Election Day. Since Texas launched its program, 32 states, mostly in the South, Midwest, and West, have adopted similar measures, almost always with bipartisan support.

Some states offer nearly a month of early voting, while others offer only a week. The practice has boosted turnout in some states by 2 percent to 4 percent, and it’s proved extremely popular with people who were already voting.

Election officials have found that it also offers another benefit: Giving citizens more time to make their way to a polling place not only allows more flexibility, it decreases Election Day chaos.

Like most Southern states, North Carolina traditionally has suffered from dismal voter turnout, ranking among the bottom 15 states election after election, and civic leaders worked for years to get the legislature to address the problem. In 2000, early voting

was first instituted, and in 2007, a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers passed a set of measures that increased the early-voting period to 17 days and offered citizens the option of registering and voting on the same day. State Representative Danny McComas, one of the Republicans who supported the bill, proclaimed, “It’s a sacred right that we have to vote.”

The changes bore fruit almost immediately. In 2008, thanks to the historic nature of Barack Obama’s candidacy and his campaign’s aggressive mobilization effort, North Carolina leapt into the top 15 states for voter turnout.

Just how much early voting can be credited for the increase isn’t certain, but what is clear is that Obama organizers made extra days at the polls an essential part of their strategy to mobilize voters.

For the first time since 1976, the state went Democratic in a presidential contest. Although Obama narrowly lost the state in 2012, turnout continued to be impressive, including an 80 percent participation rate among black voters, the second highest in the country.

Now the state’s Republicancontrolled legislature and newly elected Republican governor are set to undo the whole slate of election reforms that have helped boost turnout. GOP lawmakers plan to shrink the early-voting period, in addition to adding a photo-ID requirement and ending same-day registration. Early voting in North Carolina has become a partisan issue. The question is, why?

Until the 2008 presidential election, Democrats and Republicans across the country were equally inclined to vote in person ahead of Election Day. The Obama campaign’s aggressive promotion of early voting changed that; in 2008 and 2012, it was used disproportionately by African Americans.

That has triggered Republican suspicions and turned a reform endorsed by both conservatives and

Early voting was a bipartisan reform.Why has it become a political football in states like North Carolina? liberals into an object of GOP ire.

Cutting days, though, may backfire. In North Carolina, 57 percent of all voters cast ballots early in 2012. Polling shows only 23 percent of state residents support shortening the voting period.

The proposal certainly won’t help prevent voter fraud, a Republican obsession, because the most experienced staff usually man the stations during early voting, providing, if anything, more security.

Most election officials like having

more days. The extended time cuts down on lines and confusion, with fewer people having to cast provisional ballots because of registration problems.

Nationally, early voting continues to gain popularity. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, which advocates for election reform, this year lawmakers in 20 states introduced measures to institute or expand the practice.

Maryland increased the number of early-voting days, and the New Jersey Legislature approved a bill only to have Governor Chris Christie veto it. “This is the first year where we saw such a boom in early-voting legislation,” says Diana Kasdan, senior counsel at the Brennan Center.

Perhaps the most unlikely state to expand—or, to be accurate, re-expand—the practice this year has been Florida. Republican lawmakers in 2012 were determined to make voting more difficult and passed a slew of measures, including a decrease in early-voting days.

The November election was a mess of long lines and addled officials.

Obama still won, but Republican legislators and Governor Rick Scott—who staunchly supported the decrease—had to face public outrage over their ill-conceived changes. When they reconvened, lawmakers started restoring the reforms they’d taken away. Earlyvoting days are mostly back in place, and new, more convenient polling places will be opened. Not exactly the outcome Republicans had in mind. 

VOLUME 24, NUMBER 4. The American Prospect (ISSN 1049-7285) is published bi-monthly by The American Prospect, Inc., 1710 Rhode Island Ave., NW, 12th Floor, Washington, DC 20036. Periodicals-class postage paid at Washington, DC, and additional mailing offices. Copyright © 2013 by The American Prospect, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without the consent of The American Prospect, Inc. The American Prospect ® is a registered trademark of The American Prospect, Inc. Postmaster: Please send address changes to The American Prospect, P.O. Box 421087, Palm Coast, FL 32142. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

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Common Core: Do What It Takes Before High Stakes

By Randi Weingarten, President AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS

A

We can reverse the troubling trend toward Weingarten speaking to the Association for a Better New York about the Common Core State Standards.

AFT and our members are not leaving this to chance. The AFT has trained hundreds of teacher-trainers in Common Core-aligned courses, and the AFT Innovation Fund provides grants to AFT affiliates trying to realize the promise of these standards. In addition, ShareMyLesson.com, the AFT’s online platform where educators can access and share their best teaching resources, has thousands of resources aligned to the Common Core standards.

Seventy-five percent of AFT members said they support the CCSS in a recent poll we conducted. But a similar majority also said they haven’t had enough time to understand the standards, put them into practice or share strategies with colleagues. An overwhelming majority are worried that the new assessments will begin—and students, teachers and schools will be held accountable for the results—before everyone involved understands the new standards and before instruction has been fully implemented.

In New York, for example, assessments were fast-tracked before other vital pieces were in place. This spring, many students were assessed on skills and content they hadn’t been taught. Yet test results in New York can be used to determine if students advance or are held back, to designate school performance, to target schools for closure, and as part of teachers’ evaluations.

Developments like these, which certainly are not limited to New York, are why I have called for a moratorium—not on the standards, or even on the testing, but on the

Photo: Bruce Gilbert

merica’s public education system could be on the brink of a once-in-a-generation revolution.

Forty-five states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for math and English language arts. The CCSS are a sharp departure from the too-common superficial sprint through huge volumes of material, allowing students and teachers instead to focus on in-depth explorations of essential skills and knowledge. The standards build on each other so that, upon high school completion, students are prepared for college and career.

These standards have the potential to reduce huge inequities in American education.

In our increasingly stratified society—both economically and educationally— educational opportunity will continue to be unequally distributed without a widespread, concerted effort such as the CCSS, which set rigorous standards for all children, whether from BedStuy or Beverly Hills. But the standards are just the start; these high expectations must be matched with high levels of support, particularly for high-needs students. Poverty or near-poverty plagues nearly 1 in 2 children in America. Wraparound services, early childhood programs, manageable class size and rich instructional programs, including art and music—all of which help meet the individual needs of children—are central to this mission.

But the CCSS face an uphill battle to realize their tremendous promise. Many policymakers are proceeding recklessly, by design or by default, blowing past the standards and moving right to the standardized testing.

Many teachers across the country report that they have received inadequate preparation and resources to effectively make this shift.

And opposition to the CCSS ranges from conservatives concerned about a national curriculum to supporters of public education who worry that setting high standards without supporting their success is a cynical plan to set up public schools for failure.

All of this makes effective implementation of the CCSS vitally important, and the

low skills and high inequality.

high stakes attached to all of this—until the standards have been properly implemented and field-tested. Students still will be assessed. Teachers still will be evaluated. A moratorium on consequences in these transitional years will allow for midcourse corrections, as needed, in aligning the standards, curriculum, teacher training, instruction and assessments.

Educators, parents, community members and opinion leaders have sent tens of thousands of letters supporting the moratorium to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and to their state commissioners of education, and several prominent newspapers have run editorials supporting the moratorium and getting the standards right. After this tremendous outpouring, citing the voices of teachers across the country, Secretary Duncan gave states an extra year to get the CCSS right, before making CCSS-aligned tests count.

Kids need more than the CCSS alone— we still have to press for the arts, libraries, manageable class sizes and all the things we know benefit our students. Helping create a road to the middle class, accessible healthcare, and housing and jobs would help a lot, as well. But proper implementation of the CCSS—and equal opportunities for all children to succeed—can help reverse the troubling trend toward low skills and high inequality that for too long has done a disservice to our students and our country.

Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: www.twitter.com/RWeingarten